


love at second sight

by chasingredballoons



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - College/University, Childhood Friends, Eventual Smut, F/F, Slow Burn, and past cheryl/heather, background veronica/reggie + josie/archie + kevin/fangs, slow burn? in MY fics? it's more likely than you think!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-01-24 02:50:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 32,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18562417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chasingredballoons/pseuds/chasingredballoons
Summary: “Oh my God, Cheryl?” A familiar voice interrupts, and Cheryl looks up from her drink in surprise — it’s been eight years but she would know that voiceanywhere— to the sight of an older but still easily recognisable figure staring at her with the same look of disbelief that Cheryl is sure is now mirrored on her own face.“Toni Topaz.” Cheryl manages to compose herself just before her jaw drops in a particularly undignified way. “It's been a while.”(or, Cheryl is five when she first meets Toni. She’s twenty when she meets her for the second first time.)





	1. a long way from the playground

**Author's Note:**

> your local au hoe is BACK with a childhood friends au in which cheryl, toni, veronica and betty (and jughead but he's mostly irrelevant) are the only ones who grew up in riverdale, cheryl and toni were besties until toni moved to the south side and they lost touch, and now everyone all attends the same (fictional) university bc reasons.
> 
> inevitably, this fic started as a little oneshot to get me back into writing, maybe around 10k words or so, but as you can see from the word and chapter count, it has now spiralled into this multichaptered monster. each chapter contains two different time periods; the first part of each chapter (titled **then** ) chronicles cheryl from age five to eighteen, and the second half (titled **now** ) is college-age cheryl in current time.
> 
> there's a few tweaks, but the majority of cheryl's backstory is the same as canon. there will be specific warnings for each chapter, and this one includes discussion of cheryl's abuse. nothing super graphic, the usual blossom family fuckery, but just a heads up.
> 
> title from the gambler by fun, chapter title from eighteen by one direction, and you can find me on tumblr [here](http://lauracarmillas.tumblr.com).

**THEN.**

Cheryl is five when she meets Toni for the first time.

It’s a cloudy Sunday afternoon the summer before first grade, and Cheryl’s in her room, surrounded by her expansive crayon collection and halfway through a drawing of her and Jason, when a large white van pulls up across the road. Which isn’t particularly noteworthy; the moving vans have been coming and going all day. Except this time, it’s followed by a bright red Cadillac, which must mean the family moving in have finally arrived.

Jason’s gone to Chuck’s house to play, leaving Cheryl without company for the afternoon, so Cheryl immediately zooms around Thornhill until she locates her mother, demanding she escort Cheryl across the road to investigate if the new neighbours have a kid. To Cheryl’s delight, they do. Her name is Toni and after some begging her parents allow her to come back to Thornhill to play with Cheryl for a few hours while Toni’s parents try to get the chaos of their new house in order.

Cheryl discovers Toni is five years old, her birthday is in October which makes her two months older than Cheryl and Jason, she doesn’t have any brothers or sisters, her favourite colour is purple and she hates cauliflower.

Cheryl’s never had much interest in having a best friend. She’s always been content just having Jason, and besides, all the other kids in kindergarten are loud and messy and some of them are  _mean_ and make fun of Cheryl and Jason’s red hair, but Toni is… Not bad. There’s something about her that makes Cheryl like her almost immediately.

Somehow the topic of juice comes up, and Cheryl is fully prepared to argue that apple is the best flavour and orange flavour  _sucks_ , when Toni gets there first and announces that her favourite is apple and her least favourite is orange.

And that does it for five year old Cheryl, who just stares at Toni for a few seconds before confidently stating, “You are my new best friend.”

Toni beams back at her. “You’re my best friend too.”

They spend the next few hours roaming the halls and gardens of Thornhill, playing twenty questions to find out more about each other, and Cheryl decides on that cloudy Sunday afternoon that Toni is definitely her new best friend. Sure, she has Jason, no one could ever replace him, but boys are so gross sometimes and besides, Jason has his own non-Cheryl best friend in Chuck Clayton. Now Cheryl has her own.

When Mrs Topaz comes over to collect Toni, Cheryl huffs and refuses to let go of Toni’s hand, not wanting her new best friend to leave.

“Cheryl can come over tomorrow,” Toni’s mom says when Toni grumbles and whines  _just one more hour please_ , before looking towards Cheryl’s mother questioningly. “If that’s okay with her mom?”

Cheryl looks up at her mother with big pleading eyes — Jason has already perfected the puppy dog eyes that makes their parents give in to his every demand; Cheryl hasn’t  _quite_ mastered it yet — and when Penelope nods and says yes, Cheryl launches herself forward into a hug with Toni.

And that’s how it starts. Cheryl-and-Jason expands ever so slightly to become Cheryl-and-Toni-and-Jason.

Cheryl spends almost as much time at the Topaz’s house as she does at her own, to the point where Mr Topaz jokes that when Toni's old enough to have her own house key he'll get an extra one made for Cheryl. In the mornings, Mrs Topaz walks with them and Jason to school, where they sit next to each other in class and share their lunches with each other and play tag with Jason and Chuck during recess, and then Cheryl and Jason’s mom picks them up in the afternoon. Except for Thursdays, when Cheryl’s mom and dad have their super secret important work meetings, so Mrs Topaz comes to collect them instead. Which Cheryl prefers, because Mrs Topaz always takes them to the park on the way home so they can play on the swings.

Toni’s dad isn’t around much, always working or whatever it is grown-ups do all day, much like Cheryl’s own father, but her mom always ruffles Cheryl’s hair when she says goodbye, and gives her hugs more than either of Cheryl’s parents do, and makes the best PB&J sandwiches Cheryl’s ever had.  _And_ she always remembers to cut the crusts off, which her own parents never do.

Toni decides one day that her favourite animal is an owl, and a determined Cheryl drags her mom around the mall until she finds an appropriately cuddly-looking stuffed owl that she then gifts to Toni, complete with a handmade card with a crayon drawing of Cheryl and Toni on the front, on Toni’s sixth birthday.

Almost the entire first grade of Riverdale Elementary is packed into Toni’s living room for her birthday party, and with each present Toni receives she announces it’s her new favourite present. It isn’t until later that evening, after everyone except Cheryl has gone, that Toni rolls over in her bed and whispers to Cheryl. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Hm?” Cheryl grumbles sleepily. Toni’s bed is  _so_ comfy, and she likes how it smells.

Toni’s knee bumps against Cheryl’s as she shuffles closer, the stuffed owl squashed between them. “Your present was my favourite.”

“You’re my favourite,” Cheryl yawns, blearily reaching out with her hand until she can link her pinky with Toni’s, quickly being lulled back to sleep by the sound of Toni’s breathing.

(Jason is going through a Pokémon phase, and when Mr Topaz asks what the owl is called, he suggests Toni calls it Hoothoot. Toni doesn’t object, nobody can come up with anything better, and the name sticks.)

They go trick or treating on Halloween, Cheryl dressed as Kim Possible and Toni as Shego, and have a competition with Jason and Chuck — dressed as Batman and Robin — to see who can accumulate more candy. Cheryl and Toni win, and Jason sulks about it for a full week.

When the Christmas market gets set up in Pickens Park, Cheryl and Toni beg and whine until Mrs Topaz relents and agrees to take them. Toni manages to sweet talk Cheryl into trying the ice skating, Cheryl only letting go of the handrail when Toni promises to not let go of her hand. They still fall over multiple times, more Cheryl’s fault than Toni’s, and after bumping her knee hard enough against the ice to make tears spring to Cheryl’s eyes, Toni helps her off the ice and pleads with her mom to buy them churros as an apology.

“Don’t tell your mom about this, honey,” Mrs Topaz tells Cheryl with a smile as she hands her an enormous churro coated in cinnamon. “Our little secret?”

“Promise,” Cheryl replies with a mouth full of churro, so it sounds a bit more like  _pwomithe_.

Toni only starts in on her own churro once she sees Cheryl smiling again, and Cheryl only notices when Mrs Topaz is herding them over towards the ferris wheel that Toni is still holding her hand tightly. Cheryl doesn’t mind.

On December the fifteenth, what seems like half the town’s population piles into Thornhill for Cheryl and Jason’s sixth birthday. It’s a lavish affair; there’s a clown making balloons animals in the conservatory, and a face-painter in the living room, and a magician pulling rabbits out of hats and ribbons out of his sleeves in the foyer.

While everyone is enamoured by the magician making a very affronted Penelope’s maple-leaf brooch disappear, nobody notices Toni grabbing Cheryl’s hand and dragging her upstairs towards her bedroom, away from the loud chaos of a mansion full of first-graders.

“What are we doing up here?” Cheryl asks in confusion, although she’s kind of relieved. A room full of six year olds makes a lot of noise — especially all of Jason’s boy friends, they’re all so  _loud —_  and there’s  _so_ many people here. Cheryl’s starting to feel a little overwhelmed.

“You don’t like loud noises,” Toni says, like it’s obvious. “And you looked like you wanted to be alone for a bit.”

Cheryl smiles, and pulls Toni into a hug, eternally grateful for her best friend, and she thinks that Toni might know her even better than Jason does now.

“Also,” Toni continues, wriggling out of the hug, taking Cheryl’s hand again and dragging her over to the window. “I didn’t think you’d noticed yet, so I wanted to show you something.”

Cheryl is about to ask what on earth Toni is talking about, before Toni is dramatically ripping the curtains back and Cheryl’s face lights up when she sees Thornhill’s gardens spread out before her, every inch covered in a layer of white snow.

They stay like that, faces pressed against the window while they watch the snow falling, until Mrs Topaz comes to find them, announcing that the cake is about to be brought out.

After most of the other kids have left, and it’s just Cheryl, Toni, Jason, Chuck, and Cheryl’s cousins Betty and Polly that remain, Jason talks everyone into a snowball fight. It’s freezing outside, and Cheryl gets snow down her coat when Polly tackles her to the ground, and Toni is already sneezing by the time Betty and Polly’s mom appears to break up the snowball fight, but then she gets to bundle up in a blanket with Toni in front of the fireplace, with a mug of hot chocolate piled high with marshmallows while they watch The Little Mermaid. All in all, it’s one of the best days she’s ever had.

Once spring rolls around and the weather is warm enough, they go camping in the Topaz’s back yard, watch Mr Topaz make them s'mores, eat way too much and then fall asleep sharing the same sleeping bag. Toni’s aunt and uncle come to visit every so often, and Toni’s aunt shows them how to make daisy chains, and they spend an entire Saturday afternoon scouring the gardens of Thornhill for every single daisy.

Toni’s grandpa drops by one day, and Cheryl is fascinated by the enormous two-headed snake on the back of his leather jacket. When Toni asks about it, her grandpa, dad and mom all glance at each other in that way that Cheryl knows from experience with her own parents means they’re about to make something up.

“I just like snakes,” Toni’s grandpa says, and Cheryl doesn’t believe him for a second, but she forgets all about it when he asks if Toni and Cheryl want to go get ice cream.

The Twilight Drive-In reopens after being closed for refurbishment over winter, and Cheryl’s mom takes them to see West Side Story, and when they notice Penelope has fallen asleep, Cheryl manages to sneak some cash out of her purse without waking her and dares Toni to go up to the concession stand and buy a second tub of popcorn before she wakes up.

During summer they splash about in the shallow end of Thornhill’s pool, under the careful supervision of Nana Rose. Cheryl cannonballs into the pool at one point, the resulting tidal wave soaking Cheryl’s mom where she’s reading a book at the poolside, and getting shouted at is worth it for how long it makes Toni laugh.

Penelope and Mrs Topaz join forces to take them to Sweetwater River on the Fourth of July  _—_  staying well back from where Cheryl and Toni are launching themselves into the water to see who can make the biggest splash  _—_  and then to get milkshakes at the newly opened Pop’s Chock’Lit Shoppe, before taking them home in time to get cleaned up before the annual barbecue in the Blossom’s backyard. Toni holds her hand through the entire fireworks display, steals most of Cheryl’s fries when she isn’t looking, and mumbles through a mouthful of burger that  _sometimes you make me feel like there’s fireworks going off inside my chest_ , which makes absolutely no sense, but it makes Cheryl feel all warm and cosy inside anyway.

Once they’ve mastered how to build the perfect blanket fort, they spend endless summer afternoons with Cheryl as the princess trapped in the fort, guarded by Jason the dragon, and Toni is the knight sent to rescue her. She catches Penelope watching them sometimes, usually always at the point that Toni ‘slays’ the dragon and Cheryl leaps into Toni’s arms yelling about her princess in shining armour, and she can never figure out the expression on her mom’s face. It almost looks disapproving sometimes, her eyes narrowing and her jaw tightening the same way it does whenever Toni’s grandpa with his snake jacket is around, but then Jason the dragon is coming back to life, and she forgets to ask her mom about it.

Early November in second grade, they’re playing in the sandbox during recess when they decide they’re going to get married as soon as their parents decide they’re old enough.

“Boys are disgusting,” Cheryl says, watching Dilton Doiley chase Chuck around with a slug in his hand. “I don’t want to ever have to marry someone like Chuck or Dilton.”

“Me neither,” Toni says, balancing a makeshift flag on the top tower of her sandcastle. “I’d rather marry you than some gross boy.”

“Me too,” Cheryl sighs. “Do you think we could get married when we’re older?”

“Of course we can,” Toni replies with a grin, reaching over to steal Cheryl’s red plastic spade so she can start digging a moat for her sandcastle. “We can get married and be friends forever.”

“Yeah TT,” Cheryl agrees enthusiastically, reaching over and nudging her pinky against Toni’s, grinning widely when Toni links them together without taking her eyes off the moat she’s now digging one-handed. “Forever.”

It’s all she needs, it’s all she’ll ever need; her, Toni and Jason, for the rest of her life.

 

**NOW.**

There are several ways Cheryl would prefer to spend her last free Friday night before classes start up again than having drinks at a seedy bar in a less salubrious area of the city. A tense and unpleasant dinner with her mother and her suitor-of-the-week. A date with her high school boyfriend. Or any man, really. Listening to Veronica talk about Reggie’s abs for a solid hour. But apparently, part of being a good friend is supporting your friend's choices in boyfriends, gang member or not, which is how she finds herself at a slightly dingy looking bar called the Whyte Wyrm, flanked by Josie, Veronica and Reggie, waiting for Kevin to reappear with his new beau.

(“ _Fangs_?” Cheryl says incredulously when Josie mentions the name of Kevin’s new boyfriend. “His parents named him Fangs?”

“His best friend apparently goes by Sweet Pea,” Josie replies. “Maybe it’s their gang thing. Instead of tattoos and a blood pact they just pick out ridiculous codenames.”

“Maybe it’s  _Kevin’s_ thing, dating guys with dumb names,” Veronica points out. “Remember  _Moose_?”)

Cheryl is used to college frat parties or Friday nights at La Bonne Nuit, herself and Josie and Veronica’s choice in cocktail bar, sipping Cosmos and exchanging gossip. Not dimly lit bars that Cheryl wouldn’t be surprised to learn a drug deal or murder or something equally as illegal had been committed in the basement.

Still. The ear-splitting grin on Kevin’s face hasn’t shifted since he first met Fangs five weeks ago, so Cheryl supposes she can stomach such an establishment. Even one frequented by biker gangs.

Cheryl wonders if they four of them look as blatantly out of place as she feels they are. Cheryl and Josie at least had the foresight to wear all black, which fits in at any bar, but Veronica is in today’s choice of glamorous cocktail dress complete with her signature pearls, and Reggie has his bright red college letterman jacket on, which makes him fairly easy to pick out in a crowd of leather jackets.

It’s not quite as run-down as it looks from the outside, and the majority of the patrons aren’t actually as terrifying as Cheryl was expecting from intimidating gang members. However, she does freeze in places when the amount of snake-related memorabilia dotted around the room registers. She’s not exactly an expert in gangs of the New York State area, but there’s one in particular she’s familiar with that are quite fond of serpents.

She nudges Veronica in the side and subtly points out the enormous banner above the bar proclaiming  _no Serpent stands alone_. Veronica’s eyebrows shoot halfway up her forehead when she realises where they are.

“We’re at a  _Serpent_ bar?” Veronica whispers, pointing out the obvious. Reggie and Josie are both completely oblivious to their shared slight nerves, the pair of them fascinated by a large glass tank to their left containing a live small red and yellow striped snake. “Should we be worried?”

“Considering at least ninety percent of crime in Riverdale was orchestrated by our respective fathers, rather than the Serpents like Betty’s mom liked to harp on about in the Register, it’s unlikely we’re about to be locked in the basement and held for ransom,” Cheryl says. “I’m fairly confident we will make it out alive.”

”Unless we tell them our last name is Cooper,” Veronica says unhelpfully.

“A Lodge and a Blossom willingly entering a Southside Serpent bar.” Cheryl hums thoughtfully. “Stranger things must have happened, surely?”

Cheryl never expected to see Southside Serpents outside of Riverdale. And yet, here they are, milling around the bar with their snake-emblazoned jackets. The same snake-emblazoned jacket that is resting on Fangs’ shoulders when Kevin brings him over to meet the three of them.

“And you claimed that Joaquin was a one-off,” Cheryl whispers under her breath to Kevin while Fangs is saying hello to Josie. “You, Kevin Keller, have a type. A little cliché that the Sheriff's son would be into gang members though, don’t you think?”

“It can’t be helped, Cheryl,” Kevin says, looking fondly at Fangs trying to fist bump Reggie and missing every single time. “Bad boys like that have an effortless charm I am entirely too weak to.”

Veronica has the ability to whirl around the room like a social hurricane and return with a new best friend and five phone numbers, so she disappears off with Reggie, Fangs and Kevin to go mingle once the introductions are done.

“So,” Josie says as she links her arm with Cheryl’s, looking a little put out that they’ve been unceremoniously abandoned. “Drinks?”

The bartender asks to see her ID, and Cheryl almost laughs. She hasn’t been ID’d since she was eighteen and discovered men are stupid if you wear a top that’s cut low enough. Her fake ID, proclaiming her to be twenty-two year old Lydia Martin rather than twenty year old Cheryl Blossom, seems to convince the bartender, who hands it back to her and gruffly asks what she would like to drink.

She’s two drinks in and still mostly sober when Josie ditches her to go flirt with a slightly terrifying looking Serpent with biceps the size of Cheryl’s head who’s been unashamedly staring at Josie since they walked in. Cheryl questions Fangs about it, and when Fangs tell her the mysterious Serpent is called Daffodil, Cheryl has to disguise her laugh as a cough.

She’s three drinks in and pleasantly buzzed when Veronica reappears from her social tour of the bar around the same time Reggie gets bored of losing to Sweet Pea at pool, so they start up their usual outrageous borderline exhibitionism.

She's four drinks in, plus one shot of something an alarming shade of purple that Kevin convinced her to try, when Fangs brings someone new over to introduce to them.

“Late to the party as always, Topaz, but these are Kevin’s friends _—_ ”

“Oh my God, Cheryl?” A familiar voice interrupts, and Cheryl looks up from her drink in surprise  _—_  it’s been eight years but she would know that voice  _anywhere _—__  to the sight of an older but still easily recognisable figure staring at her with the same look of disbelief that Cheryl is sure is now mirrored on her own face.

“Toni Topaz.” Cheryl manages to compose herself just before her jaw drops in a particularly undignified way. “It's been a while.”

“No kidding,” Toni laughs with a blinding smile that honestly makes Cheryl a little weak in the knees.

Fangs looks between them curiously. "You two know each other?"

“We were neighbours and best friends when we were like five or six or something like that,” Toni explains, saving Cheryl from trying to talk after nearly being knocked off the barstool by Toni’s smile. “God, it must have been what, seven years since we last saw each other?”

Cheryl is quite proud of how steady her voice is when she speaks. “Almost eight, I think.”

It’s been eight years and Toni got  _hot_. Gone is the gangly awkward ten year old who Cheryl chased around Thornhill during summer and built snowmen with during winter, replaced instead by a leather jacket on top of a red plaid shirt, ripped jeans so tight Cheryl swears they must have been painted on, and faded pink hair.

Veronica chooses that moment to resurface from halfway down Reggie’s throat, presumably sensing that there’s an opportunity to embarrass Cheryl. “Is this a childhood friends reunion I’m witnessing?”

“Vee, this is Toni Topaz, we were neighbours and besties when I was a kid,” Cheryl says, rolling her eyes at the way Veronica’s face lights up. “Toni, this is Veronica Lodge _—_ “

“Yes, Lodge as in daughter of recently incarcerated mob boss Hiram Lodge, let’s just get that out of the way now,” Veronica interrupts, proffering her hand to a slightly bewildered looking Toni. “I’m charmed. Topaz as in the coloured gem? Cute, I love it.”

Cheryl snorts. “You always know how to make an entrance.”

“Years of practice,” Veronica preens, taking it as a compliment, before she pats Reggie on the chest. “This beefcake is my boyfriend, Reginald.”

“Just Reggie is cool,” Reggie says, doing the bro thing of raising his glass in greeting to Toni.

“You already know Kevin,” Cheryl continues the introductions, gesturing to the other side of the bar where Josie and Daffodil are spending thirty percent of their time talking and the other seventy percent making out. “And the one pushing the limits of what is considered public indecency with your floral friend is Josie McCoy.”

“Wait, McCoy as is Mayor-of-Rockland-City-McCoy?” Fangs asks, laughing when Cheryl nods. “A Serpent and the Mayor’s daughter, how scandalous.”

“Can’t be any more scandalous than a Serpent and the Sheriff’s son,” Veronica points out, gesturing between Fangs and Kevin, and then between Cheryl and Toni. “Or a Serpent apparently being best friends with a Blossom once upon a time.”

Cheryl tunes out the rest of the conversation as Kevin attempts to defend himself and Josie’s taste in suitors. This is a bar frequented by the Southside Serpents. Toni is wearing a leather jacket, looking devastatingly good in it, which is  _not_ the point, but it bears acknowledging. Cheryl hasn’t actually seen the back of the jacket, but now she’s fairly certain that if Toni were to spin around, a bright green snake would be baring its fangs at Cheryl.

It was disconcerting enough discovering that the Southside Serpents have a presence so far from Riverdale, and now Cheryl isn’t really sure how to react to the knowledge that the six year old she played dress up with is now a member of the gang she grew up hearing horror stories about.

Cheryl tunes back into the conversation when she hears Veronica exclaim  _oh so do we! One business major, at your service_.

“Wait, you go to Rockland?” Cheryl interrupts what was sure to be a lengthy monologue about how much Veronica wants to prove that just because her father did dirty business doesn’t mean she will too, directing her question at Toni. “Which campus?”

“East,” Toni replies, and of  _course_ Toni attends the arts campus of their university. Cheryl can hazard a guess what she’s studying before Toni even continues. “I’m a photography student.”

Cheryl chuckles. “Once again, fate throws us on opposite sides of the compass. I’m on the west campus.”

“Let me guess, you’re an English major?”

Cheryl blinks. “How on earth _—_ ”

“I haven’t spoken to you in almost eight years and I’ve still never met anyone with a vocabulary like yours,” Toni says, and the smile on her face is beginning to make Cheryl feel a bit lightheaded. “Also, you read Steinbeck for fun. When you were  _ten_.”

Veronica laughs and Reggie calls her a nerd, but before Cheryl can object, they’re interrupted by a girl with a shock of red hair appearing next to Toni, handing her a drink and saying  _here you go babe_. It’s followed by Toni smiling, saying thanks and pressing a kiss to the girl’s cheek, far too close to her mouth to be considered innocently platonic, and introducing the newcomer as Megan. Her  _date_.

Cheryl’s brain short circuits for about the third time in five minutes when it hits her that Toni isn’t straight.

She starts paying attention to the conversation again right as Toni is saying something about being the reigning champion at pool, and she just sort of nods silently in response when Toni says  _catch you later, Bombshell_ as the other redhead  _—_  lesser redhead, Cheryl thinks snidely in her head  _—_  takes her hand and drags her over to the pool table with Fangs and Kevin.

Obviously it’s to be expected that Toni would have changed in the near-decade since Cheryl last saw her, but it’s still such a jarring shock, seeing Toni all grown-up and older and attractive.

 _Really_ attractive.

That last time she was so instantly attracted to someone like this was Heather, and well, Cheryl is not in any rush to repeat  _that_ fiasco. Especially not with her childhood friend turned gang member.

It’s a lot for Cheryl to process. The seven year old who proclaimed she would marry Cheryl in the sandbox at recess is now a) unbelievably hot, b) a Southside Serpent, and c) into girls. It’s bordering on too much to take in, and Cheryl suddenly feels like she’d like to be anywhere but here.

She drains the rest of her drink, and shrugs her jacket on, hoping to slip out unseen before anyone can notice.

Veronica stops her gross eyefucking with Reggie long enough to glare disapprovingly at Cheryl. “What happened to your loyalty?”

“I’m not feeling too great,“ Cheryl lies easily. “Tell Kevin that Fangs was lovely, and lie and say I was sorry I had to leave early.”

Reggie raises an eyebrow. “You’re not sorry though.”

“That’s why it’s called lying, Bromeo,” Cheryl deadpans.

“What about Toni?” Veronica asks, raising her eyebrows in what she probably intends to be a meaningful way, but she just looks surprised.

Cheryl glances over to the pool table, where Megan is making hearteyes at Toni while Toni moves around the table to line up her next shot. She leans over to angle her pool cue better, giving Cheryl an excellent view of her ass in those incredibly tight jeans, and Cheryl quickly looks away, thankful the dim lighting of the bar hides the faint blush she can feel rising on her face.

“I’ll see you at home, Veronica.”

She’ll make it up to Kevin somehow. Buy him that limited edition vinyl of the Cabaret soundtrack she knows he’s been eyeing up. As for Toni, well. Rockland University is an enormous campus with thousands of students. On the off-chance she bumps into Toni again, they’ll probably have a slightly awkward conversation about that time they were best friends when they were little idealistic children, make plans to meet up sometime, and then never will, and they will both continue on with their lives.

Cheryl can live with that.

(Even if all-grown-up Toni now takes first place for the hottest girl Cheryl has ever seen in her  _life_.)

/

Inevitably, after not seeing Toni once in the two years they've apparently gone to the same university, she sees Toni again Tuesday morning after the party. Cheryl has just come out of her first art history lecture of the semester, her sole class on the East Campus, and she’s in the middle of replying to Josie’s Snapchat and ignoring Veronica’s seven texts going from begging to bribing Cheryl to go by Starbucks on her way home when she hears someone calling her name.

She looks up from her phone to see Toni waving at her. She’s wearing an oversized black sweater that makes her look very cuddly, skintight jeans, scuffed combat boots  _—_  there’s no heels to give her a height advantage, and Cheryl notes with petty smugness that she has a good few inches on Toni; twelve-year-old Cheryl cackles with vindication after always being the shortest out of Toni and Jason and herself  _—_  and there’s an expensive looking camera hanging by a strap around her neck.

Cheryl is well-versed in suppressing and compartmentalising her feelings, so she easily ignores the way her heart starts beating a touch faster at the sight of Toni grinning widely at her.

“Hey,” Toni says when she comes to a stop in front of Cheryl. “Thought I recognised that red hair. I was beginning to think I’d hallucinated seeing you on Saturday.” The corner of Toni’s mouth quirks up into a teasing smile. “Considering how quickly you vanished.”

Cheryl feels her face flush the same colour as her hair. Which is an interesting reaction for her body to have. Cheryl Blossom is not easily flustered. She files that away to think about another time.

“I apologise for that, I felt quite unwell. I had a bout of food poisoning the week before and I suppose it hadn’t fully cleared up yet.”

Toni raises her eyebrow like she doesn’t believe a word Cheryl’s saying. She’s hoping Toni won’t call her out on it, but she’s not in luck. “You’ve had eight years to practice, and you still can’t lie to me to save your ass.”

Cheryl is an  _excellent_ liar  _—_  she didn’t make it through high school relatively unscathed without learning how to fool the most perceptive of her fellow peers  _—_  but she could never pull the wool over Toni’s eyes when they were kids, and it appears nothing has changed now they’re adults, regardless of how long it’s been since she’s seen her former best friend.

Cheryl huffs, before pointedly looking away from Toni in slight embarrassment. “I know tensions are less strenuous now than they used to be, but I’m sure you remember how bad the north and south divide used to be in Riverdale?”

Toni snorts. “Vividly.”

“It’s been drilled into my head since I was a kid that the Serpents are dangerous, and I  _know_ they’re not actually as bad as Alice and Hal Cooper liked to claim they are in the Register but…” Cheryl trails off, aware of how incredibly juvenile she sounds. “It just threw me a little, the knowledge that my childhood best friend is now a gang member.”

“You bailed because you were freaked out I’m a Serpent?”

“Believe me, I am aware of how ridiculous that sounds,” Cheryl grumbles when Toni’s grin only gets wider.

Thankfully Toni seems to be more amused than offended. “It’s alright, I get it. It’s been eight years, and we’re not twelve anymore. Last time I saw you, you had glasses and braces and permanent braids in your hair while we argued over which Jonas Brother was the cutest one.”

“I still stand by Joe.”

“You’re still wrong because it’s Nick, but whatever,” Toni says breezily, ignoring Cheryl’s squawk of objection. “Anyway, you’re one to talk. You might’ve been shocked that I’m a big bad dangerous Serpent now, but I was not expecting  _this _—__ ” Toni waves her hand in Cheryl’s general direction. “ _—_ to come stalking into my bar like she’s just stepped out of the pages of a Vogue magazine.”

It’s not often that Cheryl is rendered speechless, but this is one of those rare moments that she has absolutely no clue how to respond. Toni pauses while Cheryl flounders for something appropriate to say, before she hitches the strap of her bag up on her shoulder in a way that almost looks nervous before she speaks again. “Are you busy right now?”

“Not at all. Finished classes for the day, I was just about to head home for an exciting evening of pretending to study while the Netflix that’s  _on in the background_ has my full undivided attention.”

“There’s a diner a couple blocks from here, it’s not quite as good as Pop’s but my burger obsessed friend claims it’s the closest Rockland has to the Riverdale landmark. Let me buy you a milkshake, strawberry’s still your favourite right?” At Cheryl’s amused nod, Toni continues enthusiastically. “I can tell you all about my journey to Serpenthood and then you can tell me everything that has happened in the life of Cheryl Blossom in the past eight years. Your whole life story, I wanna know everything I missed.”

Another thing that doesn’t appear to have changed: Cheryl is still utterly hopeless at saying no to Toni.

/

Toni takes her to a diner a ten minute walk from campus that Cheryl has walked past a hundred times but never actually been in, and soon they’re settled in a booth in the back corner, strawberry milkshake in front of Cheryl and chocolate for Toni, and a basket of nachos with an absurd amount of cheese piled on top sitting between them.

“So,” Cheryl says while Toni immediately descends on the nachos. “How's your girlfriend?”

“My girlfriend?” Toni asks with a confused look.

“That girl you were with on Friday?" Cheryl clarifies, trying valiantly to sound genuinely and platonically interested and not like a jealous ex-not-girlfriend. “Megan?”

Toni looks confused for a few more seconds, and Cheryl gives her an incredulous look before Toni brightens up and says, “Oh, her. She's not my girlfriend.”

“Does she know that? You two seemed quite cosy.”

“You mean for the five minutes you saw us?” Toni teases, but thankfully continues talking before Cheryl can panic and do something stupid like blurt out that she was jealous Megan was the one who got to openly stare at Toni’s ass. “I went out with her a few times but that's all. I'm not really looking for a relationship right now anyway. Had a pretty messy breakup with my ex like five months ago so I’m not in any rush to jump back into the dating pool.”

Toni isn’t interested in a relationship. Cheryl makes a mental note of that; she has a sinking feeling she’s going to need to frequently remind herself of that if her and Toni are going to be friends.

“What about you?” Toni asks, scooping an obscene amount of cheese onto a nacho and shoving it in her mouth. “There a future Mr or Mrs Blossom in the picture?”

“The future  _Mrs_ Blossom has yet to make her presence known to me,” Cheryl says, watching Toni’s face carefully for any reaction to the reveal of her sexuality. The faintest of smiles appears on Toni’s face, but that could just be from Toni enjoying the nachos.

“Well, I’m sure she’ll be worth the wait,” Toni says, pausing her assault on the nachos to take a sip of her milkshake.

(In retrospect, Cheryl probably should have seen it coming; there’s only so long a conversation involving Cheryl’s life can stay light and breezy.)

“Anyway, how’s your better looking twin?” Toni continues, unintentionally hitting Cheryl right in the chest with a stab of pain. “He a bigshot architect yet? You know I still have one of those Lego houses he built me for my eighth birthday somewhere.”

Cheryl needs a second to remember how to breathe. When she gets caught off guard like this, it still sometimes takes her a moment to remember  _oh, I don’t have a brother anymore._

“Actually uh, Jason passed away when we were fifteen,” Cheryl says, giving Toni a tight smile.

The easy smile that’s been on Toni’s face since they stepped into the diner drops instantly, before the sympathetic expression Cheryl’s become used to passes over her face. “Oh. Cheryl I’m… I’m so sorry to hear that.”

Cheryl just shrugs helplessly; she’s heard those words so many times and she’s still not sure how to respond. She keeps her gaze on her milkshake and there’s a slightly uncomfortable silence for a few moments, as one would expect after dropping that kind of bomb.

“Can I ask what happened?” Toni eventually says, her voice gentle. “You can tell me to back off if that’s too much.”

“It’s okay, I’m _—_  I can handle talking about it now,” Cheryl says, ignoring her gut instinct to deflect and pushing past the lump in her throat. “It happened the beginning of sophomore year. Jason had made first-string on the football team and I was already second-in-command on the cheerleading squad. The Bulldogs had a game against Fairview Academy in late September, and afterwards the football team and the rest of the Vixens went to Pop’s to celebrate the first win of the season. It had been raining heavily that whole day, and by the time my dad came to pick JJ and I up, it had turned into quite the downpour, and while we were en route back to Thornhill we collided with another car. Daddy had some pretty major internal bleeding and I broke my arm, but Jason…” Cheryl glances down at her left arm, brushing her thumb over the thin white line just below her elbow, the sole reminder  _—_  aside from the Jason-shaped hole in her heart  _—_  of the day that irrevocably changed her life forever. “Well. You know how this story ends.”

Cheryl glances from her scar up to Toni, noting the distraught look in her eye, and she chuckles slightly. “You can stop worrying that you’ve accidentally torn open an old wound. I said I was okay talking about it, didn’t I?”

“I know, but still,” Toni says, still looking lost for words. “I can’t even imagine what that was like.”

Cheryl reaches out to the neglected nachos and picks one up, collecting as much tomato salsa that will fit onto it. “I’ll miss him forever, and it’s never really going to stop hurting,” she murmurs. “But I can talk about him and hear his name now without having a complete breakdown, so.”

It’s nowhere near the full story, there’s still the subsequent incident at Sweetwater River and the following years of emotional, occasionally physical, abuse and unspoken  _it should have been you_ from her mother, not to mention all her non-Jason-related traumas, but she’s hardly going to unload  _everything_ onto Toni just like that.

“Anyway,” Cheryl says, forcing some cheer into her voice to indicate the subject is about to be changed. “I believe I promised you a Toni Topaz exclusive on the life of Cheryl Blossom in return for this milkshake, so where would you like me to start?”

“Hm,” Toni hums, pretending to think for a few seconds before she smirks, looks Cheryl dead in the eye, and says, “You were a cheerleader, huh?”

The way Toni wiggles her eyebrows like an obnoxious frat boy has the intended effect Toni was obviously aiming for; Cheryl feels some of the tension bleed out of her shoulders and she laughs.

“Excuse you, I was not  _a_ cheerleader, I was  _the_ cheerleader.” Cheryl throws in a toss of her hair for good measure. “Captain of the River Vixens junior and senior year.”

“I could have guessed that,” Toni chuckles. “You wanted to be a cheerleader ever since we watched Bring It On when we were like seven. So apart from realising your childhood dreams of becoming the real life Torrance Shipman, what was the almighty Cheryl Blossom like in high school?”

“I was also student body president both junior and senior year. I had a 4.0 GPA. I played Carrie in our junior year production of Carrie: The Musical and Heather Chandler in our senior year production of Heathers: The Musical, and…” Cheryl pauses for a second before powering through. “And I was a complete nightmare in high school.”

Toni raises an eyebrow. “Oh, so you weren’t just  _the_ cheerleader, you were  _that_ cheerleader.”

“Guilty as charged. Think Kathryn Mertuil on bath salts. And that was on a good day.”

“Well, according to multiple early 2000’s movies and TV shows starring thirty-year-olds playing teenagers, behind every mean queen bee is a tragic backstory,” Toni says after a moment’s pause, clearly giving Cheryl the option to back out and change the subject. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours?”

Cheryl hesitates. It’s one thing just casually mentioning she was a colossal bitch in high school, it’s another thing entirely to explain teenage Cheryl’s messed-up reasoning behind everything she did.

Toni must see the trepidation on Cheryl’s face, because her expression immediately softens. “Hey, no pressure. Don’t feel like you have to tell me anything.”

It should feel weird. Cheryl should hear the alarm bells ringing in her head and she should feel all her bulletproof walls going back up automatically. Having a best friend at age twelve is quite different to having a best friend at age twenty, and the eight years they haven’t known each other should cancel out the seven years Toni was tied for the most important person in Cheryl’s life. They’re not little kids anymore, they’ve both changed  _so_ much, and she’s only ‘known’ Toni again for a few hours so it makes absolutely zero sense that she should feel so  _safe_ around Toni. But against all rational reason and natural defenses she’s had since she was ten and she first realised her parents had picked a favourite twin, she does.

“There was a myriad of contributing factors to my behaviour,” Cheryl starts, stalling for a bit of time by taking a long sip of her milkshake. “Losing Jason certainly didn’t help matters, but another major cause was how deeply closeted I was. I had always been abstractly aware of the whole lesbian thing and it was always lurking in the back of my mind, but I had a persona to uphold, and I didn’t really want to give my parents another reason to call me a disappointment.”

Toni’s face softens in what Cheryl recognises as sympathy. “They not a fan of you bringing home a Princess Charming instead of a Prince?”

“God no,” Cheryl scoffs, fighting off a slightly-hysterical laugh at the thought of her mother’s reaction if Cheryl brought a girl back to Riverdale for a  _meet the parents_ scenario. “They were both vocal enough about such matters that I knew for a fact it would not have been received well, and so I just pushed it down and ignored it and dated the captain of the football team hoping that it would go away. Obviously, it did not, but the internalised homophobic damage was already done and it wasn’t until I got out of Riverdale and away from my mother that I was able to accept myself.”

Toni’s hand, which has been inching slowly closer to Cheryl’s almost since their conversation started, finally crosses the halfway mark of the table, and Toni nudges Cheryl’s pinky with her own, just like when they were kids. Cheryl links them together, the movement still automatic even after so many years, and Toni squeezes encouragingly, waiting patiently for her to continue.

Now that Cheryl’s started talking, she can’t stop. Even now, hundreds of miles from Riverdale and years on from being sixteen, a small part of her still believes every nasty comment Penelope Blossom threw her way, and is still shocked when someone appears to be genuinely interested in her life and still latches on when someone shows her even the slightest bit of kindness. Even now, now that she has Josie and Veronica and Kevin, and logically she  _knows_ they aren’t going to just up and leave her, there’s still a teeny-tiny part of her that’s still wondering when the rug is suddenly going to be yanked from underneath her Louboutins and they’re going to turn around and say  _really Cheryl? Did you really think that anyone would really care? That anyone could truly love you?_

“Another primary cause of my delightful disposition was Penelope and Clifford Blossom,” Cheryl continues, making sure to choose her words carefully. There is a time and a place to reveal to a former best friend you haven’t seen in almost a decade that your mother occasionally beat the shit out of you. This is neither the time nor the place. “They never really recovered from JJ’s death, so a lot of the time they took it out on me.” Cheryl scoffs bitterly. “Like they had some kind of monopoly on grief. I mean, you remember what they were like, they were never exactly the warmest of parents, but…” Cheryl trails off, and pauses to steal one of the remaining nachos that survived Toni’s assault. “After we lost JJ they just… It’s like they resented me for being the one to survive. They never made any secret of the fact JJ was the favourite, and it just got so much worse once I didn’t have him to protect me anymore.”

Cheryl vaguely registers that she should probably shut up, that this is far too heavy a conversation to be had in a cheerful diner over milkshakes and nachos, but Toni’s familiar smile that hasn’t changed in eight years completely dismantles her, and the words just keep coming out.

“And then Daddy got arrested,” Cheryl continues, slightly confused when Toni just nods knowingly.

“Yeah, I heard about that.” Toni raises an eyebrow at the baffled look on Cheryl’s face. “We did get newspapers in the south side, Cheryl.”

“Right,” Cheryl mutters, flushing slightly and ignoring Toni’s giggle. “Anyway, it turns out the maple syrup trade isn’t quite as lucrative as the Blossom clan would have you believe. He used it as a front for his drug empire. So once he was gone that left just me as the sole target of Penelope Blossom’s rage.”

Calling it something as flimsy as  _Penelope Blossom’s rage_ is definitely watering it down, but as strangely comfortable as she is with Toni, that’s all she’s willing to disclose. At least currently. One day she might have the guts to tell someone every gory detail of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. Whether that someone is Toni remains to be seen.

“Due to all of…  _that_ , unfortunately the result was I transformed into quite the Machiavellian mean girl, and I took it out on everyone around me.”

Toni blinks owlishly at her from across the booth, and Cheryl suddenly feels like a complete moron. What the hell was she thinking, spilling her guts like that to someone who’s essentially a complete stranger? Toni was probably just expecting  _oh I was prom queen and then I graduated and now I’m here and I still visit Riverdale for Christmas and Thanksgiving every year!_ Not a dead brother and a criminal father and an abusive mother.

“I, uh _—_ ” Cheryl pauses, humiliation creeping up on her that she’s poured her heart out to Toni during what’s basically their second conversation since they were twelve and their most serious conversations consisted of who played which colour in their games of chess. “I realise that’s kind of a lot to unload onto you. I apologise.”

“Hey, you don’t have to apologise,” Toni interrupts. “I meant what I said about wanting to know everything I missed. Fate might have thrown us on opposite sides of the compass again, but it has also thrown us back together in the same city. Maybe it’s a sign, possibly from fate itself, that we could be friends again. If that’s something you wanted?”

“I wouldn’t be opposed to the idea, I suppose,” Cheryl grins at Toni over her milkshake, and she’s hit with nostalgia of spending summers drinking her body weight in milkshakes with Toni in Pop’s, and she realises that she  _really_ wants to be Toni’s friend again.

“Anyway,” Cheryl says, reaching out for a nacho and glaring in disgust at the jalapeño touching the one she goes for. “Your turn. What’s your sob story? How does the girl who got nightmares from Jumanji become a badass gang member?”

Toni laughs, plucking the jalapeño Cheryl is trying to dislodge off the nacho and popping it in her mouth, much to Cheryl’s disgust. “That was  _one_ time, Cheryl.”

“One time that will be forever remembered,” Cheryl replies, gesturing pointedly at Toni with her nacho. “Now, stop stalling. You can start with your parents.”

“Well, you already know what happened with my dad, you were there for that saga of the Topaz family drama,” Toni starts, as effortlessly cheerful as she’s been the whole time, before her face falls slightly. “As for my mom, I have no idea how she is. I haven’t seen her in almost four years.”

 _That_ throws Cheryl a little bit. It’s hardly a secret that Cheryl and Penelope didn’t have the greatest of mother-daughter relationships, but Toni and Mrs Topaz were always inseparable. The kind of relationship that would have meant photographs of Toni all over Mrs Topaz’s office walls or Toni sharing ten different variations of _share this meme or your mom will break her leg_ posts in a row on Facebook, accompanied by a comment of  _can’t risk it!_ The kind of relationship that, even as young as eight or nine, Cheryl was always privately a little bit jealous of.

“About a year after we moved to the south side, money started getting tighter, and despite promising me she never would, my mom got caught up in the drug trade.” Toni’s jaw tightens minutely, and Cheryl can already guess the outcome of this tale. “Sold them more often than did them, and she got arrested and held overnight a couple of times, nothing that really stuck, but eventually her luck ran out and she got caught with a massive stash of cocaine.”

“Oh, Toni,” Cheryl says, and without really thinking about it, she reaches out to link their pinkies together again. “I’m so _—_ ”

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” Toni interrupts. “It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault but her own.”

Cheryl squeezes Toni’s pinky in what she hopes is a comforting way. A strained mother-daughter relationship is something she can sympathise with.

“I was only fourteen at the time, so Child Services left me in custody of my uncle, who was a major asshat, but he was also a Serpent. I was a little put off, initially, but the more time I spent around them _—_  which, I couldn’t exactly avoid them, living right in the middle of the snake pit that is Sunnyside Trailer Park. But the longer I was around them, the more I realised that Alice Cooper and her ilk  _really_ had no clue what they were spouting in the Register about them. I joined the Serpents when I was sixteen, and bounced between staying with my uncle when he was in a good mood and my grandpa when he wasn’t until I graduated, and now I’m here,” Toni gestures around them. “In a booth at a discount Pop’s, with my childhood best friend.”

“Fate works in mysterious ways,” Cheryl says, trying and failing to sound deep when she starts laughing in the middle of her sentence. “How did your education fare? Was that rumour that someone stole all the water out of Southside High’s pool true?”

“Yes, actually. I don't think they ever found out who did it,” Toni snorts, pausing to take one of the few remaining nachos. "Again, much like everything involving the south side, school wasn’t as awful as you’d think,” she continues, rolling her eyes for good measure. “My first day after I transferred to Southside Middle School, this kid named Jughead immediately swooped in to take me under his wing. His dad is the current leader of the Serpents and he’s pretty friendly with my grandpa, who is also a Serpent, as it turns out, so he asked Jug to look out for me. My third day, a couple of Ghoulies tried to _—_ ”

“I’m sorry,” Cheryl interrupts. “Forgive my northsider ignorance, but what the hell is a Ghoulie?”

“They’re this rival gang, they traffic in drugs, bit of illegal street racing every now and then, rumours of cannibalism, that kinda thing.”

Cheryl raises an eyebrow. “They sound charming.”

“Very. A bunch of them tried to jump me after school finished, something about an initiation into south side life; beat the shit out of the new kid. Long story short, I beat the shit out of them while Jughead cowered in the corner, and after that it was kinda me looking out for him.”

“His knight in shining flannel.”

“Oh absolutely,” Toni says, offering Cheryl the lone remaining nacho and then stuffing it into her mouth when Cheryl declines. “I had plenty practice being the knight saving the princess with you though, didn’t I?”

Cheryl snorts in a exceptionally unflattering way, vividly remembering the summer they had turned Jason’s bedroom into one gigantic pillow fort. “How could I possibly forget my very first saviour?”

Cheryl doesn’t intend for the vaguely flirtatious tone to make its way into her voice, but it slips in there nonetheless. She kind of freezes, praying that Toni hasn’t noticed, and if she has that she won’t say anything, but she’s saved from her internal panicking by a waitress appearing to ask if she can get them anything.

“Cherry cola,” Cheryl says, making a mental note to leave the waitress an extra large tip for distracting Toni from how spectacularly Cheryl stuck her foot in her mouth.

“And another chocolate milkshake, please,” Toni adds on, thanking the waitress as she clears their table of the empty glasses and nacho basket.

“So,” Cheryl says, intending to breeze past and completely forget about the fraction of a second she accidentally flirted with Toni. “You turned into a delinquent after three days at Southside Middle School. What did you do after three days at Southside High?”

“Joined the school newspaper, actually,” Toni says, glaring at Cheryl with no real malice. “It was about all there was in the way of extracurriculars. No Southside equivalent of the Vixens or Bulldogs to be found.”

Cheryl resolutely does  _not_ entertain the image of Toni in a cheerleading outfit. Not even for a second. Nope, absolutely not.

“We did have a drama department though, and we attempted West Side Story during junior year, but then the girl who was playing Anita got caught dealing jingle-jangle and went to juvie, and the guy playing Riff got stabbed in a Serpent-Ghoulie altercation and almost died, so the whole thing kind of fizzled out.”

It doesn’t really sink in how different Cheryl and Toni's respective school experiences had been until Toni says that so easily, like that's just a normal thing that happened at Southside High. People were getting stabbed and arrested while Toni was trying to choreograph them, meanwhile the most scandalous thing that occurred during rehearsals for Carrie during Cheryl’s junior year was The Infamous Feud that Veronica and Betty seemed to be going through.

(At the time, Cheryl was never entirely sure what had kickstarted their disagreement, but now that she’s thinking about it, she’s fairly sure that was around the time she started a rumour about Betty trying to go after Veronica’s boyfriend after Veronica had said something that pissed her off. She feels a little bit guilty at the reminder of the person she was in high school, and resolves to actually use Betty’s name next time she speaks to her, rather than the host of nicknames she reserves just for her dear cousin.)

“Southside High sounds like a truly…  _unique_ educational institute.”

“That’s certainly one word for it. Southside High was a gang-war infested dump where students attended more drug deals than classes,” Toni says, and once again, with one simple sentence Cheryl is reminded of how Toni's school years had been poles apart from her own. “The day I graduated and got the fuck out of there is one of the happiest days of my life.”

There’s a brief lull in the conversation as the waitress returns with their drinks, setting the cola in front of Cheryl and the milkshake in front of Toni, before Toni is talking again.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love the Serpents. They’re my family, the only ones I’ve got left, but I saw what the south side did to people, and like hell was I going to be another Riverdale reject. I worked my ass off to get out of Riverdale, so did Jughead. And it paid off,” Toni leans back in the booth and pats her camera where it’s sitting on the table next to her. “I get to study photography and Jug gets to study journalism, at a university where every second class doesn’t have someone shooting up in the back row, or the police storming the place with tear gas and sniffer dogs at least once a month.”

“Journalism? We should set him and my sweet Nancy Drew-aspiring cousin up, they’d be perfect for each other,” Cheryl says, ignoring the latter part of Toni’s sentence, because honestly, how is she even supposed to reply to that? The closest Riverdale High had to a criminal was Chuck Clayton getting a speeding fine and having his license suspended. “What about Jolly Green Giant and Kevin’s beau? Riverdale natives too?”

Toni shakes her head. “Nope, Fangs is born and bred Rockland City, and Sweet Pea is from Centreville.”

“Centreville?” Cheryl wrinkles her nose. “That explains so much.”

“Doesn’t it?” Toni laughs. ”Jughead lives with the two of them, but Sweets is my roommate’s boyfriend so I find him lounging around my apartment all the time like he lives there, and Fangs works at the Wyrm with me. He’s the one who actually got me the job, and to this day I’m still convinced he bullied one of the other Serpents into quitting so I could take her place, all because I was short on rent  _once_.” Toni picks up her phone and shows Cheryl her background, a picture of Fangs and Sweet Pea towering over Toni, both of them using her shoulders as arm rests. Cheryl glances up at Toni to find her looking fondly at the screen. “They’re both idiots, but they’re  _my_ idiots.”

“They’re both Serpents?” Cheryl questions, and Toni nods. “I thought the Serpents were just a Riverdale thing?”

“Originally founded in Riverdale, but we’re all over the state. No Serpent stands alone.” Toni pauses to take a sip of her milkshake. “So, what about you? How did Kevin, Josie and Veronica get stuck with you?”

“Josie was my roommate in freshman year, and it was best friends at first sight,” Cheryl begins, plucking the mascherano cherry out of her cola and popping it in her mouth. “She was the first person I’d met who was unaware of all the baggage that comes attached to the Blossom name and she just made me feel  _normal_. I didn’t feel like the girl with the dead brother, or the girl with the criminal father, it was like I was just a normal eighteen year old. She was exactly what I needed at that point in my life, and truthfully I’m not sure where I would be without her.”

Cheryl smiles softly at the thought of her best friend; after losing Toni and Jason in the span of a few years, Cheryl had just accepted that maybe she wasn’t the kind of person that had friends who loved her. And then Josie McCoy came crashing into her life and made her completely reevaluate that thought.

“I met Kevin at a Pride club meeting of all places when I finally decided to stop hiding and take my first steps out of the closet,” Cheryl continues. “He likes to refer to himself as my gay Yoda.”

Toni snorts. “Is he?”

“Don’t tell him I said this, but yes,” Cheryl says. “Sexuality-wise, I was not in a good place when I first met him, but he really helped me. Talked me through all my confusion. Marathoned Imagine Me and You, and DEBS, and I Can’t Think Straight with me. Took me to my first lesbian bar and left me to fend for myself while he flirted with the only other gay guy there.”

“I don’t know if you’re looking for sympathy with that last one, but that’s exactly what Sweets and I did when Fangs first came out to us. Don’t you pout at me like that, Cheryl Marjorie Blossom, you’ve never going to learn if you don’t get chucked in at the deep end.” Cheryl glares at her, and Toni just laughs. “What about Veronica?”

“I’ve known her since high school. After the Lodges moved to Riverdale from New York, Mr Lodge and my father were business associates or rivals depending on what day it was, and the same applied to Veronica and I. We had our amicable moments, but overall we weren’t friends. It was very much  _keep your friends close but your enemies closer_.” Not for the first time, Cheryl wonders if her high school life would have been any different if her and Veronica were genuine friends. Hell, if her and  _anyone_ had been genuine friends. If she hadn’t been so terrified of anyone getting close enough to really know her and just let someone in. “We didn’t really reconnect until her father got arrested a few years ago. Turns out sharing criminal paters can forge a surprisingly strong bond. Now that we’ve both got our heads out of our asses and grown past our ridiculous high school rivalry, Veronica is second only to Josie for a coveted spot on Cheryl Blossom’s inner circle.”

Toni stares pensively at her milkshake for a few seconds, before: “I cannot believe you replaced me with a Lodge.”

“You replaced me with someone called  _Jughead_ ,” Cheryl retorts, and Toni laughs.

Cheryl hasn’t even registered how much time has passed until she glances out of the window while Toni is still laughing at her and realises it’s gotten dark outside.

She checks her phone notifications, which consist of Veronica calling her a traitorous bitch in several creative ways and in two different languages, Josie saying she’s in the mood for pizza if Cheryl will be home for dinner, and Kevin tagging her in something on Facebook.

“Shit, I didn’t even notice the time,” Toni says, and Cheryl glances up to see Toni looking at her own phone. “I gotta run, meant to be having a movie night with Fangs tonight and it’s my turn to be on snack duty.”

Cheryl starts shrugging on her coat; considering how late in the evening it is, it’s probably quite cold outside. “Agreed, I should be on my way too.”

“Just before you disappear on me again…” Toni trails off, typing something on her phone before sliding it towards Cheryl. There’s a new contact page already open, the name filled out as  _Bombshell_ with a cherry emoji after it, and Toni smiles expectantly at her. “Hopefully we can do this again soon?”

Toni texts her once Cheryl hands her phone back  _—_  a text consisting of a single sunglasses emoji  _—_  so Cheryl has her number too, and Cheryl saves it under  _TT_ with a snake emoji after it.

Once they’ve exited the diner, Toni seems to dither for a few seconds, before she surges forward and gives Cheryl a quick hug goodbye, and nostalgia smacks Cheryl right in the chest at the vaguely familiar scent of laundry detergent that half of Cheryl’s childhood clothes ended up smelling like, either due to Mrs Topaz washing them for her, or Toni stealing her sweatshirts and tshirts.

Cheryl hopes she doesn’t look as stunned as she feels when Toni pulls back at the sound of her phone ringing. “Okay, I really gotta go now,” Toni says, glaring at her phone. “I’ll call you tomorrow, we can make plans to meet up later this week if you want?”

“I’d like that,” Cheryl says, tugging her coat tighter around herself while she deludes herself that the shiver that went down her spine had everything to do with the cold and nothing to do with Toni hugging her. “Enjoy your movie night, tell Fangs I say hello.”

“Will do, Bombshell,” Toni says, mock-saluting Cheryl as she turns and walks away.

Cheryl stares after her for a few seconds, at the bright green two-headed snake on the back of Toni’s Serpent jacket, before she realises how creepy she’s being, and starts walking in the direction of the university campus where her car is still parked.

Vaguely, Cheryl remembers how she felt when she first met Toni fifteen years ago. How there was that instant connection, how she was drawn to her right from the first second, how she immediately wanted to know everything about Toni. She feels exactly the same way now, she realises, and decides as she’s driving back to her apartment that she wants to know Toni now as well as she knew her eight years ago.

(And that’s how it starts the second time.)


	2. you are a magnet, i am metallic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hello again friends, here is the one where they flirt some more and cheryl thirsts some more. guest appearances from betty, jughead and the cranberries. the c-word (crush) is also used (!)
> 
> no major content warnings for this one apart from a few vague mentions of penelope being The Best Parent Ever™
> 
> chapter title from unavoidable by neon trees (what a fwb au throwback) and my tumblr is [here](http://lauracarmillas.tumblr.com).

**THEN.**

Cheryl is twelve when Toni’s parents split up.

She’s in the conservatory, accusing Jason of cheating at Monopoly when he claims a Chance card is allowing him to rob the bank, when a teary-eyed Mrs Topaz appears out of nowhere, depositing Toni with Jason and Cheryl before disappearing off with Cheryl’s mom. Jason asks what’s going on and Toni just stares at them both for a second before promptly bursting into tears.

“They think that I— I can't hear them, but they’ve been arguing so much for so long,” Toni sniffles, once she’s calmed down enough to tell a very distressed Cheryl and Jason what’s happening. “I think— I think my dad is leaving.”

From what they can gather from sending Jason to eavesdrop outside their parents’ study, Toni’s suspicions are correct. Toni’s bottom lip quivers and she furiously wipes at her eyes with her sweater sleeve when Jason says that Chuck’s parents are divorced, and now he only sees his mom on birthdays and holidays.

“JJ,” Cheryl hisses, glaring at her brother when Toni gets more upset at the d-word. “That isn’t helping. Shut up.”

During the following few weeks, Toni gets left with Cheryl and Jason a lot more than usual, and a steady revolving door of older men and women in important looking suits keep appearing at the Topaz household. Cheryl only ever sees Mrs Topaz when she’s dropping Toni at Thornhill, always looking like she’s about to start crying, and she doesn’t see Mr Topaz at all.

Toni comes over one Saturday morning before Cheryl’s even gotten out of bed, bursting into the room, climbing into Cheryl’s bed and cuddling up to her while tearfully explaining her parents screaming at each other woke her up.

“They wouldn’t stop _shouting_ , Cher,” Toni whimpers, shoving her face into Cheryl’s neck and pressing closer. “I was so scared.”

“You have me, TT,” Cheryl says sleepily, wriggling around until she can fit her arms around Toni. “I won’t let them hurt you. Ever. I promise.”

Around a month into all the drama, Mrs Topaz sits Toni, and by extension Cheryl, down and gently explains that they won’t be seeing her dad anymore.

“I don’t understand,” Toni says, already close to tears and nearly breaking Cheryl’s hand where she’s gripping it so tightly.

“You know that when two people love each other very much, they get married, right?” Mrs Topaz starts, and Toni and Cheryl both nod. “Well, when two people get married, it’s supposed to last forever. But sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

Mrs Topaz reaches out to take Toni’s free hand, smiling sadly at her. “It just doesn’t. There’s no reason, but sometimes two people just aren’t meant to be together.”

“But you and dad..." Toni says, her voice wavering. "You love each other.”

“Not anymore, honey. I’m sorry.”

Toni’s quiet for a few moments, before she sniffles and looks back up at her mom. “Does this mean you’re gonna leave too?”

“No,” Mrs Topaz says firmly, moving from the ottoman she’s been sitting on to sit next to Toni on the sofa, pulling her into a hug. “No, sweetheart, I promise. I will never leave you, Toni. Not ever.”

Toni’s mom makes them her magic mac and cheese and lets them eat in the living room while they watch Alice In Wonderland, one of Toni’s favourite movies, in an attempt to cheer Toni up a little. It only works in the sense that Toni isn’t crying anymore; she still looks devastated.

Later, when Toni’s fallen asleep with her head in Cheryl’s lap while Alice and the Queen of Hearts are playing croquet on the screen, Mrs Topaz reappears and comes to sit next to Cheryl on the sofa.

“Cheryl honey, I need you to promise me something,” Mrs Topaz says, putting one arm around Cheryl to hug her and playing with Toni’s hair with the other hand. “I need you to promise that you will always take care of Toni.”

Cheryl’s eyes narrow. “I thought you said you weren’t going to leave. You _promised_.”

“I know. And I’m not going to leave. But with her dad gone, I’m going to need to work more, so I’m probably not going to be able to spend as much time with you both. So I need you to be there for her.”

That sounds an awful lot like _it’s going to feel like I’ve left_ , but Cheryl is too tired to argue, and doesn’t want to risk waking Toni up, so she just sighs and relents. “I promise.”

On the day her dad officially moves out, Toni cries for hours, and Cheryl does her best to comfort her. Cheryl’s parents and Mrs Topaz let Toni sleep over that night, and Toni eventually falls asleep curled into Cheryl’s chest, exhausted from crying. There’s a damp patch on the shoulder of Cheryl’s new nightgown, an errant gift from her grandmother, but she doesn’t care.

Toni asks if she’s ever going to get to see her dad again, and Mrs Topaz looks pained when she says she doesn’t know. When Toni asks if she knows where her dad has gone, Mrs Topaz doesn’t know that either.

Cheryl’s never seen Toni this defeated and withdrawn before. Cheryl doesn’t really know how to comfort people, and as hard as she tries with Toni, eventually all the _it’ll be okay TT_ ’s start to sound like a clichéd broken record.

Three months after Mr Topaz leaves, Toni’s grandpa stops by with a gift for her. It’s a slightly battered looking camera, complete with a few rolls of film, and Toni’s face lights up with a smile while her grandpa explains he’d been doing some spring cleaning, came across the camera and thought Toni might like it.

It’s the first full genuine smile Cheryl thinks she’s seen from Toni since her dad left, and it’s seems like it’s the turning point for her. She spends the rest of the day taking pictures of Cheryl and Jason, both at her house and then at Pop’s when they go out for dinner and then at Thornhill when Toni comes back for a sleepover. The smile doesn’t leave her face the entire time.

After that, Toni slowly starts to return to her normal cheery self. There’s still bad days where they feel the missing presence of Mr Topaz more than usual, days that end up with Toni curling up against Cheryl in her bed, sniffling while Cheryl plays with her hair until she falls asleep, but gradually those days become few and far between.

For Spring Break, Cheryl’s parents take her, Jason and Toni to the Blossom lake house near the Canadian border, and Toni, with all her thirteen year old single-minded focus, lives out her new dream of being a photographer. The camera barely leaves her hand until the second last day, where she realises with a disappointed expression that she’s used the last of her film taking photos of the nearby small town Clifford had taken them to earlier in the day.

Upon their return to Riverdale, Cheryl generously donates most of her allowance to Toni so she's able to get all the photos from the trip printed. In return, she demands her own copies of two particular photos: one of her and Jason sitting on the dock of the lake, facing away from the camera as the sun sets in the distance, and one of Cheryl, Toni and Jason that Penelope took for them, all ankle deep in the shallow waters of the lake, arms around each other and grinning toothily at the camera.

Cheryl frames them to sit on her nightstand, and every time she looks at the two photos, when she wakes up in the morning and when she goes to sleep at night, her chest feels so full it might burst.

Cheryl thinks it’s called being happy.

Six months after Mr Topaz leaves, Cheryl’s world is thrown completely off its axis when Toni tells her she and her mom are moving away.

Cheryl blinks, wondering if she’s misheard. They’re in the middle of a very intense chess game, and maybe Toni has resorted to trying to shock Cheryl to throw her off her game. “What?”

“We’re moving,” Toni repeats, moving her bishop to take one of Cheryl’s pawns. “To the south side. My mom told me this morning.”

“Why?” Cheryl demands, chess game and current win streak of three games entirely forgotten.

“Mom says we can’t afford this neighbourhood anymore,” Toni says, looking up from the chess board with a dejected expression. “At least it’s just to the other side of town. It’s not like I’m moving across the country.”

Cheryl appreciates Toni trying to soften the blow, but it still _hurts_. Her best friend is leaving her?

“You might as well be!” Cheryl pouts. “The south side is scary. And dangerous! Where are you even going to live?”

Toni shrugs, fiddling with one of her rooks. “I think my mom called it Sunnyside? My grandpa stays there, it can’t be that bad.”

There’s a lump in her throat that Cheryl has to fight hard to speak around. “But— but what about us? How are we going to see each other all the time?”

“I don’t think we’ll be able to,” Toni says after a few moments, her voice wavering.

The tear-filled expression on her face spurs Cheryl into action, scooting across the floor of Toni’s living room, accidentally sending both of Toni’s knights and one of her pawns rolling under the sofa, and flings herself into Toni’s arms for a hug.

How is she supposed to exist in a world where she can’t spend the majority of her time with Toni every day? Where they can’t have sleepovers every Friday and Saturday? Where they can’t gang up on Jason during water pistol fights in the summer and snowball fights in the winter? Who is she supposed to confide in that she’s slowly realising her parents love Jason just a little bit more than they love her, and who is Toni supposed to confide in that she’s terrified her mom will follow in her dad’s footsteps and leave Toni?

She doesn’t realise it until now, wrapped up in Toni’s arms with a pawn digging into her thigh, that Toni has always been as concrete a fixture in her future as Jason is.

Every time she’s pictured her future, it’s been with Toni on one side of her and Jason on the other. When she makes head cheerleader in high school, Toni will be her second in command while Jason is captain of the football team. When they graduate and go off to college, her and Toni will be roommates while Jason lives across the hall with the college-version of Chuck. When she gets married Toni will be her maid of honour and Jason will be there to walk her down the aisle.

She doesn’t know how to plan for a future that doesn’t include one of them.

“You’ll still be my best friend, you know?” Cheryl says, her voice muffled where her face is pressed against Toni’s neck.

Toni squeezes her tighter. “I know. You’re mine too. Friends forever, remember?”

At first, they still see each other all the time, just like they planned. It’s an odd adjustment to make, being unable to see Toni whenever she feels like it, but they make it work.

It doesn’t mean she doesn’t miss Toni with every atom of her being, though. Misses rainy afternoons spent in Thornhill’s conservatory with Cheryl’s ever-expanding collection of art supplies surrounding them and trying to avoid getting paint on the Persian rugs. Misses passing notes to Toni in classes and spending her lunchtimes with Toni and Jason and Chuck. Misses going for walks with Toni in the park and feeding the ducks at the pond until Jason would launch a pebble into the water and scare them away, and Cheryl and Toni would chase him around, tackling him to the ground and tickling him until he apologised.

She misses Mrs Topaz too, her ruffling Cheryl’s hair even though she’s too old for it, her magic mac and cheese, how she always treated Cheryl like a second daughter, so much so that whenever Cheryl was upset, her first instinct was to cross the road to the Topaz household instead of seeking out her own mother for a cuddle and some cheering up.

Like most northsiders, Cheryl is forbidden from even thinking about crossing into the south side, so she never gets to visit the mysterious Sunnyside. Instead, they meet up in Pop’s a few times a week after school, Jason tagging along every now and then, and Toni comes over on weekends for movie nights. They still spend most of the summer before eighth grade together, at the river or lounging by the pool at Thornhill or spending half their allowances on milkshakes at Pop’s.

And then eighth grade starts, and Toni’s visits become less and less frequent; sometimes Cheryl’s too busy with her new friends Ginger and Tina, and sometimes Toni’s too busy with someone called _Jughead_ of all things. Multiple phone calls a day dwindle down to one or two, and then once a week, and then every other week, and eventually, Toni just becomes someone Cheryl used to know.

 

**NOW.**

**TT** **🐍** : _this is the most boring shift of my life_

 **TT** **🐍** : _i’ve had like three customers since noon_

 **TT** **🐍** : _pay attention to me_

Cheryl’s phone buzzes again just as she’s pulling into the gravel parking lot of the Whyte Wyrm, and once she’s parked and exited her car, she unlocks her phone to see Toni’s latest whining.

 **TT** **🐍** : _you are literally the worst friend ever_

A second text that just consists of angry face emojis comes through just as Cheryl is pushing the door to the bar open to walk inside.

Toni hadn’t been exaggerating; the bar is extremely quiet. Not that Cheryl would have expected any different at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday. There’s a trio of Serpents congregated around one of the pool tables, and two more sitting in one of the booths playing some sort of board game, but apart from that the Wyrm is empty.

Cheryl spots a flash of pink hair, and she heads towards the bar, where Toni has her back to her, singing along to the Cranberries song that’s coming from the ancient looking jukebox in the corner while she chops some limes.

“You are, without a doubt, the neediest friend I have ever had,” Cheryl says, smile growing as she watches Toni whirl around to stare open-mouthed at her. She’s holding a small pink knife in one hand and half a lime in the other, and she looks so far removed from the threatening gang member she’s supposed to be that Cheryl can’t help but laugh.

“Cheryl,” Toni squeaks, and driving across the city, almost taking a wrong turn and getting lost, and getting judged by a scruffy biker who was outside smoking when Cheryl arrived who didn’t look like he knows how to spell the word _hairbrush_ let alone uses one, it's all worth it to see Toni’s face light up like that. “What are you doing here?”

Cheryl lifts her phone up. “I got your texts. You were beginning to sound desperate around the tenth one, so I took pity on you, thought I’d come and keep you company.”

Toni gives her a smug smile as Cheryl tries to pick out the cleanest of the barstools to sit down on. “You drove all the way to the east side of the city just to see me? I’m flattered, Bombshell. I didn’t think you liked me so much.”

“Don’t let it get to your head, Topaz,” Cheryl says airily, finally finding a barstool that doesn’t have any dubious stains on it and doesn’t wobble when Cheryl nudges it. “I simply had nothing better to occupy my time with.”

Toni places the hand not holding the knife over her heart dramatically. “Ouch.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’d like to drink?” Cheryl asks, tapping her nails against the bar. “This is terrible service.”

Toni laughs as she puts down the knife and lime, picking up a cloth to wipe the lime juice off her hands. “Did you come here just to insult me?”

“I’ve already told you this is merely a visit borne of pity and boredom, but I can continue to be mean if that’s what you’re into.”

Just like their afternoon in the diner — which Toni has taken to calling Budget Pop’s, so much so that Cheryl can’t actually recall the diner’s real name — Cheryl doesn’t _mean_ for her comment to come out sounding quite so flirtatious, but unfortunately it does.

Toni raises an eyebrow and gets a mischievous look on her face like she’s about to say something that will make Cheryl flush spectacularly, but miraculously, just like their afternoon in the diner, Cheryl is saved from Toni mocking her by one of the Serpents from the pool table coming up to the bar for a drink. One day her luck is going to run out and Cheryl will accidentally flirt with Toni and there will be nothing and no one to interrupt them and save Cheryl either from being teased relentlessly or, God forbid, Toni flirting back. Cheryl isn’t sure which option she’d prefer.

The Serpent says hello to Toni, asks for a pint of _Snake Oil_ , whatever the hell that is, and gives Cheryl a strange sidelong look.

She still feels remarkably out of place in the Whyte Wyrm, all immaculate hair and blood-red lipstick and expensive clothes whereas the other patrons of the bar are all scuffed combat boots and ratty leather jackets. The sixteen year old version of Cheryl wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this, a dive bar that offers beers such as Viper Venom or Asp Ale, while Cheryl is more of a Cristal kind of girl. However, twenty year old Cheryl likes to think she’s matured enough to step outside her comfort zone a little. Not too far, of course. Just a little.

(And only for Toni.)

“I’m still waiting for _my_ drink, you know,” Cheryl says when Toni’s finished cashing off the Serpent’s beer.

“So demanding,” Toni chuckles, and Cheryl’s not entirely sure if she’s imagining the flirtatious note to _Toni’s_ voice this time. Toni opens one of the refrigerators behind her and picks up a carton of cranberry juice, mock saluting Cheryl as she goes. “Coming right up, your highness.”

Toni makes her a mocktail that tastes like it has an alarming amount of sugar in it, but it’s delicious and Cheryl happily sips at it while Toni moves her chopping board and pile of fruit to the other side of the bar so she can continue chatting to Cheryl.

While their last conversation at Budget Pop’s had been remarkably heavy, in contrast this one is a much more light-hearted catch up.

Toni tells Cheryl about the road trip her, Jughead, Fangs and Sweet Pea took down to Orlando the summer before sophomore year, and how it is never happening again because _eighteen hours in a car with three teenage boys is what I imagine one of the lower circles of Hell is like._

Cheryl tells Toni about the road trip her, Veronica, Josie and Kevin took down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras the previous year, scrolling through the hundreds of photos on her phone to show Toni, including the very bad ones that didn’t make it to Instagram or Facebook.

Toni shows Cheryl the dark red stain on the floor of the bar that _we tell everybody is blood because it sounds way cooler and gives us an air of dangerous mystery_ and then conspiritally looks around before whispering to Cheryl, “It’s actually grenadine. I tripped carrying a bottle and it smashed and went everywhere.”

Cheryl tells her about life at Riverdale High, about trying to keep the Vixens in line and her constant back-and-forth with Veronica, and Toni regales her with colourful tales from the south side, mostly featuring Jughead and the pair of them almost getting arrested. They talk about their favourite colours — “Still red, obvi. Pantone’s Flame Scarlet, if we’re being specific.” — and their favourite movies — “Jughead and I once holed up in his apartment and watched Hitchcock movies for a solid twenty-four hours. I’ve never needed a shower so bad in my life.” — and their favourite bands — which sparks a fairly heated debate between The 1975 vs Arctic Monkeys — and all the while The Cranberries are playing softly in the background.

 _You know I’m such a fool for you_ , Dolores O’Riordan is crooning. _You’ve got me wrapped around your finger._

Cheryl tries to tune it out.

She’s in the middle of a lengthy speech about how she’s attempting to get Josie to admit she has a crush on one of the boys in her songwriting class—

(“Josie isn’t really the relationship type, she’s more of a—”

“Nail and bail?”

“Love them and leave them kinda girl, but she’s mentioned this mysterious Archie Andrews a suspicious amount of times now.”)

—when her phone buzzes and lights up with a notification. It’s nothing important, just Instagram informing her that _bettysnooper liked your photo_ , and it sparks Cheryl into bringing up something she’s been playing with asking Toni all week.

“You remember my cousin Betty, correct?”

Toni glances over from where she’s rearranging the whiskey bottles on the other side of the bar. “The one with the ponytail?”

“That would be her,” Cheryl replies. “It’s her birthday on Saturday, and it is in our best-friend-and-cousin-duty for Veronica and I to be in attendance. Reggie will be also be in attendance as Veronica’s plus-one, but that still leaves two free seats in Veronica’s car. Perhaps you and your other Riverdale-native Serpent might like to join us for an impromptu weekend road trip back to the town with pep?”

“Hm, that depends,” Toni says, wandering back over to the side of the bar Cheryl is occupying. “Are you just asking if we want to hitch a ride with you before you hide us away in the south side, or are you inviting us to a north side party?”

“Both, actually,” Cheryl replies. “I doubt Alice Cooper will be thrilled if I show up to her daughter’s birthday dinner with two Southside Serpents in tow, so you might have to find a way to amuse yourselves until the obligational dinner is over, but there will be a party at The Pembrooke afterwards that you are more than welcome to attend.”

“The Pembrooke? That wannabe Waldorf Astoria on Maple Street?”

“The Lodges occupy the penthouse suite, and Veronica has offered to host the party there,” Cheryl clarifies.

“Somehow that does not surprise me,” Toni snorts, disappearing through a door at the back of the bar that she told Cheryl earlier contains spare stock for the bar.

Toni reappears a few moments later carrying a crate of Budweiser bottles, and Cheryl gets a little distracted surreptitiously staring at Toni’s biceps as she carries the crate over to one of the half-empty refrigerators. It takes her a few seconds to realise that Toni has started talking again, and she shakes herself out of her reverie and focuses back on Toni’s voice, hoping she hasn’t been caught.

“—but if Betty doesn’t mind us tagging along and Veronica is alright with a couple of Southside scumbags tarnishing the legacy of her penthouse, I would love to.” Toni’s gaze shifts to look over Cheryl’s shoulder. “As for Jughead, you can ask him yourself.”

Toni nods her head at something behind Cheryl, and she turns around to see a boy around their age walking into the Wyrm and towards the bar. He’s wearing a Serpent jacket, a slightly ratty looking beanie, and he doesn’t look like he’s had more than an hour’s sleep in the past two days.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in a lecture right now? Don’t tell me you’ve started skipping classes.”

“It got cancelled,” the boy, presumably Jughead, responds as he reaches them, dumping his bag onto the barstool next to Cheryl and taking a seat on the next one. “Professor Cochrane apparently had to take his pet hamster to the vet. So, I thought I’d come bother you at work, but I didn’t think you’d already have company.”

“Jug, this is Cheryl,” Toni says as she picks up a glass, fills it with cola and slides it towards Jughead. “Cheryl, Jughead.”

Cheryl offers her hand in greeting. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet the infamous Jughead Jones.”

Jughead shakes her hand, staring at her in a slightly unsettling way before he turns to Toni and says, “ _the_ Cheryl?”

Cheryl could swear Toni flushes slightly. “Yes. _The_ Cheryl.” She turns to Cheryl. “Poor Jug had to hear all about you and how much I missed you when I first moved to the south side.”

“And I’ve had to hear all about you for the past few weeks as well,” Jughead adds, and Toni throws a beer mat at him.

Cheryl has to hide a smile at the thought of Toni not shutting up about her.

“Anyway,” Toni says, glaring at Jughead and pointedly not looking at Cheryl. “Cheryl and a couple of her friends are going to Riverdale this weekend, and we have been invited along. You up for a trip home?”

“Sure,” Jughead says, taking a sip of his drink. “My dad’s always complaining that I don’t visit him enough, this might placate him until Thanksgiving.”

“We’ve even been invited to a north side party,” Toni says, her eyebrows bouncing in mock shock.

“Instead of being asked to work it?” Jughead says in surprise. “Times must be changing. You sure you can handle a pair of Southside scumbags lowering the tone of this party?”

“Well,” Cheryl begins when Jughead and Toni’s expectant expressions clue her in that the question wasn’t rhetorical. “I can’t speak for the rest of my north side friends, but I, personally, have come to find that, abundant self-deprecation aside, not all Serpents are the scum of the earth.”

Jughead snorts, and Toni laughs. “High praise, coming from north side royalty,” she says, turning back to continue her task of squeezing the entire crate of Budweiser into the small refrigerator shelf.

“So, Cheryl,” Jughead says, turning to face Cheryl. “If you knew Tiny before she came to the south side, that must mean you have a veritable plethora of embarrassing stories about her, correct?”

“She does _not_ ,” Toni squeaks indignantly.

Cheryl ignores her. “I most certainly do.”

“You’re going to tell him about the maple syrup incident, aren’t you?” Toni groans, looking like she’s considering climbing into the refrigerator to get away from the embarrassment Cheryl is about to unleash on her.

“I was actually going to start with the cheddar cheese debacle, but since you’ve reminded me…” Cheryl turns to fully face a delighted Jughead. “When Toni and I were nine, she discovered that she liked maple syrup…”

/

Friday morning, they leave an hour later than planned due to Reggie sleeping in, Jughead not being able to find his beanie, and Veronica forgetting to pack her favourite pearl necklace. When Reggie finally stumbles out of his apartment and into the front seat of Veronica’s Maserati — Jughead had barked with laughter when he and Toni arrived at Cheryl and Veronica’s apartment and caught sight of the car — he almost instantly falls asleep and starts snoring. They’re just leaving the city boundary and passing the _you are now leaving Rockland City! Come again soon!_ sign when Toni pipes up that she needs the toilet.

Around the two hour mark, they stop so Veronica can have a break from driving, and Cheryl is looking down her nose at the selection of drinks available at the tiny gas station they’re at — what kind of sick place doesn’t sell anything even close to cherry flavoured? — when Toni comes sidling up next to her.

“Can I ask you something?”

“If it’s a drink recommendation, absolutely not. Has Veronica somehow driven us into a hell dimension where the only remotely appealing drink is Mountain Dew?”

Toni snorts. “No, it’s not that. And hey, Mountain Dew isn’t that bad.”

“I am having serious reservations about this friendship. I’m not sure I can have someone in my social circle that feels in any way positively about Mountain Dew.”

Toni laughs, glancing around to make sure there’s no one around to eavesdrop. Veronica is in the restroom, Jughead is examining the sandwich selection with a very focused look on his face, and Reggie is still asleep in the car. “When you go back to Riverdale, where do you stay?”

Toni trails off, the _Thornhill with your mom_ left unspoken.

“With Veronica, mostly. The Coopers if I happen to be there _sans_ a Lodge.”

If Toni tries to hide her relief at hearing that Cheryl won’t be at Thornhill, she does a terrible job doing so. There’s a weird warmth in Cheryl’s chest, at the thought that Toni cares that much about her.

“You’re staying with Jughead, right?” She asks, instead of focusing on her body’s continued odd reaction to Toni’s presence.

Toni nods. “My grandpa’s always said I’m welcome to stay with him, but his trailer only has the one bedroom, and since he always insists I take it, with his age I feel guilty letting him sleep on the sofa.”

“What about your uncle?”

Toni’s jaw tightens. “Yeah, I’m good.” At Cheryl’s curious look, Toni elaborates. “He’s an alcoholic, one who refuses to admit he has a problem and who refuses to get help. I can never predict if he’s going to be home at five pm to make dinner or if he’ll come stumbling through the door at two in the morning in a drunken stupor, so staying with Jughead is preferable. Safer.”

Cheryl would happily chug an entire litre of Mountain Dew if it meant making sure Toni never felt unsafe ever again. Cheryl knows what that’s like, has been in that position many times, and she wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

“Are you safe at Jughead’s?"

Toni chuckles. “ _Safe_ isn’t really a word I’ve ever associated with the south side, but yeah, I’ll be fine at Jug’s. His dad, who _did_ get help for his drinking problems, is great. He’s probably the closest thing I have to a father figure now.”

Cheryl links their pinkies together and gives it a reassuring squeeze, but before she can say anything, Veronica ruins their little moment by poking her head around the aisle and telling them to _get a move on or get a room_. Cheryl fights off the flush she can feel threatening to surface on her face while she flips Veronica off and Toni clears her throat, abruptly very interested in the bottles of water.

Jughead and Veronica, surprisingly, are getting along like a house on fire, and when Cheryl and Toni return to the truck — Cheryl with a bottle of diet coke and Toni with a bottle of Mountain Dew, much to Cheryl’s disgust — Veronica wakes up Reggie to oust him from his seat next to her so Jughead can replace him, letting them continue their competition to see who can drop more literary references into their conversation.

“I can’t believe Jughead found the one person in the world who gets more into a discussion of Kierkegaard than him,” Toni chuckles as Reggie slumps into the seat next to Cheryl.

Which is fine. Cheryl likes Reggie. She has no qualms about sitting next to him. Except while burger-and-novel loving Jughead doesn’t take up too much room, Reggie’s longest standing relationship is with the gym, making him a lot bigger than Jughead, therefore Cheryl has to shuffle over a bit to make room for him, and before she realises it she’s pressed up against Toni’s side.

“This is cosy,” Toni remarks, and Cheryl wills her heart to calm down.

Cheryl can feel the heat of Toni’s body through the fabric of Toni’s blue plaid shirt and Cheryl’s black long sleeved top, and it distracts her from the competitive game of I Spy the remaining two hours it takes for the _welcome to Riverdale_ sign to come into view.

/

After dropping Toni and Jughead off at Sunnyside Trailer Park on the south side of Riverdale with a time and The Pembrooke’s address to meet up for Betty’s post-dinner party, Cheryl, Veronica and Reggie drive back over Sweetwater Bridge to the north side.

The route through Riverdale that leads to the Pembrooke takes them past Thornhill, and Cheryl glances out of the window at the foreboding mansion, and she is abruptly transported back to sixteen, trapped in that gothic horror of a house and hating every aspect of her life.

There’s a light on in what she knows is the master bedroom, and she shudders involuntarily, reminded of why she avoids returning to Riverdale as much as she possibly can.

Dinner is nice; they go to DiMaggio’s, the only semi-decent restaurant in Riverdale other than Pop’s. She greets Betty with a hug and an appropriate amount of happy squealing that Veronica then repeats tenfold. Cheryl and Veronica and Betty all exchange stories about their respective classes, Polly tells them about Juniper and Dagwood, her tragically named twin one-year-olds, and when Hal orders a scotch with a barely pronounceable name, he and Reggie start a discussion about malt whiskies with far too many Scottish names for Cheryl to keep up with.

After, Alice drops the three of them plus Betty and Polly back at The Pembrooke, and they keep up the appearance that this is just going to be a classy soirée with champagne and canapés until Hermione announces she’s departing, she’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, and asks them very politely not to trash the penthouse.

“And if anyone throws up, clean it up yourselves. I gave Elena the day off tomorrow, so there’ll be no one to do it for you,” she adds on, looking very pointedly at a sheepish Veronica.

Five minutes after she leaves, Toni and Jughead show up, Toni with a bottle of Jim Beam and Jughead with a case of Corona.

“I feel like I’ve stepped into the Twilight Zone,” Jughead says, not bothering to conceal his awe as he stares around the apartment in wonder. He looks over at Toni, who’s currently opening a bottle of Louis Roederer for Cheryl since she doesn’t want to ruin her nails. “I can’t believe you were once a north sider.”

Toni laughs, popping the cork of the bottle and pouring herself, Cheryl and Jughead a glass each. “How the mighty fall, right?”

They clink their glasses together, and the party is kickstarted a moment later when Reggie finally manages to figure out how to work Hermione’s overly complicated entertainment system, and Avicii starts booming through the penthouse.

/

Sunday morning sees Cheryl up bright and early, cackling at the combined groans of an extremely hungover Veronica and Reggie when she opens the curtains in Veronica’s bedroom. “Good morning, sleepyheads!”

“Cheryl, fuck _off_.”

Cheryl tuts. “Language, Veronica.”

“I feel like roadkill,” Reggie groans from his side of the bed, still hidden under the covers except for a tuft of black hair peeking over the top of the duvet.

“Maybe if you didn’t feel the need to drink your body weight in tequila you would feel a touch more human.”

“What do you _want_?” The Veronica shaped lump groans. “If you’re here to drag us to breakfast I’m going to need at least an hour to wake up.”

“Oh, I was just letting you both know I’m off out for a bit, going for breakfast with Toni. In case you regained consciousness of your own volition and wondered where I had gone,” Cheryl says cheerfully. “You can go back to sleep now.”

She just narrowly avoids the pillow that gets hurled at her.

/

Cheryl arrives first, The Pembrooke closer to Pop’s than Sunnyside, and Cheryl has already claimed a booth for them when the bell above the door heralds Toni’s arrival. She’s glad she didn’t bother bullying Veronica and Reggie into sobering up and coming along when she sees that Toni is also on her own.

“Good morning. How’s your hangover?”

“On the way out, thankfully. Nothing my body weight in bacon can’t fix.” Toni stares at her for a few seconds. “How do you look fresh as a daisy without a hair out of place when I watched you do five shots in a row last night?”

“Superior genetic material, and having Josie as my party-partner since freshman year,” Cheryl grins, sliding the menu across the table towards Toni when she spots a waitress heading in their direction. “What are you having?”

Toni barely glances at the menu. “I doubt this menu has changed since Pop’s first opened,” she comments, just as the waitress arrives and greets them. “Can I have a Breakfast Special with extra bacon and a black coffee in the largest available size, please.”

The waitress chuckles, and turns expectantly to Cheryl. “One original pancake stack and a latte for myself, please.”

They have the usual post-party debrief, Cheryl clearing up the mystery of where one of Jughead’s socks went — “He slingshotted it out of the window on a dare from Reggie. I would imagine it’s still on the neighbouring roof.” — and Toni enlightening Cheryl that yes, she did indeed sing karaoke with Polly last night.

The food arrives after about ten minutes, and Cheryl immediately drenches her pancakes with the bottle of Blossom Maple Syrup sitting on the table while Toni pours a slightly irresponsible amount of sugar into her coffee.

“You want some pancakes with your syrup?” Toni asks with a raised eyebrow. Cheryl can’t quite tell if she’s disgusted or impressed.

Cheryl affectionately pats the bottle on its lid. “It’s hard to be too cut up about the fact it’s blood money when it tastes so good.”

The conversation lapses into silence while they eat, and Cheryl is delighted to discover that it’s not awkward in the slightest. Normally, Cheryl is perfectly happy to fill silences with endless talking, but she’s always happy when she finds someone she can just sit in comfortable silence with. Josie, Veronica, Kevin are three such people, and now it seems Toni has been added to the list.

The neon lights of Pop’s cast a soft pink glow over Toni, making her look almost ethereal, and Cheryl kind of gets lost in her for a few seconds, feeling herself fill with so much fondness and adoration for her former-turned-current best friend that she wonders how she doesn’t explode with all the overflowing affection.

Toni smiles at her, sweet as maple syrup, and Cheryl feels her stomach flip-flop alarmingly. “What are you staring at, Blossom?”

“I really missed you, you know,” Cheryl says, ignoring Toni’s question. “After you left.”

Toni’s face softens. “I missed you too.”

“You were my best friend, and one of my biggest regrets from that part of my life was that I never tried harder to keep in touch.”

“Don’t put all the blame on yourself, Cher," Toni says, waving away her apologies with her fork. "I stopped trying as well, not just you. Besides, it would’ve taken a miracle for us to make Riverdale history as a northsider and a Serpent being best friends.”

Cheryl inclines her head in agreement. “Fair point.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” Toni says with a smile that completely disarms Cheryl. “Somebody, somewhere, tied a red string of fate between us, and we found our way back to each other.”

Cheryl’s heart lurches in a way that feels very pivotal and very dangerous.

“Well, seeing as we have been blessed with a chance to start again, it would be foolish to waste it,” Cheryl says, lifting her coffee cup up in a toast. “To second chances.”

“To second chances,” Toni repeats with a fond smile, clinking her coffee against Cheryl’s.

As Cheryl puts her mug down, Toni’s lips quirk into a smile, but before Cheryl can question it, Toni is reaching out with a hand to wipe away some milk foam from Cheryl’s top lip. Out of nowhere, Cheryl is overcome with the urge to lean across their booth and kiss Toni, to see if she tastes like her coffee or if she just tastes like _Toni_.

“Not sure you’d suit facial hair, if that milk moustache is any indication,” Toni says with an easy grin, like she has no idea she just temporarily reduced Cheryl to having the brain function of a coma patient.

It’s not until she’s managed to remember how to act like a normal person and gone back to her pancakes that Cheryl recognises the song that’s playing softly through the diner.

 _I know I felt like this before, but now I’m feeling it even more, because it came from you,_ The Cranberries taunt her for the second time in a week. _And then I open up and see, the person falling here is me_.

Whatever. Dolores O’Riordan doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

/

Cheryl checks the time on her phone as they exit Pop’s, 11:43am displayed on the screen.

“So,” Cheryl says. “We aren’t departing for the return journey until six, and I am not due to meet Betty for lunch until three, so you have my company for another three hours.”

“I’m honoured. Anywhere you’d like to go?”

Cheryl thinks about it for a few moments, mentally exhausting Riverdale’s small list of attractions — and wow, she always forgets how boring Riverdale is until she returns — before she gets an idea.

“Well, since I no longer have my parents’ stranglehold on me dictating what I can and cannot do…” Cheryl says with a mischievous glint in her eye that makes her feel ten years old again. “You’re always talking about how the south side isn’t as bad as we northsiders make it out to be. How about you put your money where your mouth is and prove it?”

“You want to see the south side?" Toni asks, her eyebrows raising in surprise as Cheryl nods. "I suppose a tour of the lesser half of Riverdale can certainly be arranged,” she grins, adjusting the beanie on her head that Cheryl has been trying very hard not to think of as _cute_. “If you’re not getting sick of me yet, Bombshell.”

Cheryl swats Toni on the arm playfully. “Never.”

/

Riverdale has always been a very picturesque town, with Fox Forest and Sweetwater River and Pickens Park, and places like Pop’s and the Twilight Drive-In all lending themselves to some Instagram-ready photos, and that appears to extend to the south side as well.

It’s definitely not as well-kept as the north side; there’s quite a few abandoned buildings with boarded up windows and covered in graffiti, and she does spot a few suspicious gatherings of people down the occasional alley, but overall, the south side is not as scary and desolate as The Register liked to paint it as.

Cheryl imagines that at night time it’s a little more dangerous, with Ghoulies and Serpents and God knows who else running around and lurking in every shadow, but in the daylight, the south side seems relatively harmless. Although she supposes the lack of neanderthals leaping out of the shadows to assault them could be attributed less to the midday sunshine and more to the bright green snake on the back of Toni’s jacket, warding off any potential hooligans that mistake Cheryl’s red hair for an easy target.

They wander through the streets of the south side, taking in its small town charm — admittedly scruffier than the north side’s, but still there nonetheless — while Toni takes her role as tour guide very seriously, pointing out various landmarks and offering pieces of history in relation to them.

(Toni’s tour doesn’t seem to be in any danger of veering towards the banks of Sweetwater River, which Cheryl is grateful for. The last time she visited the river, on her sixteenth birthday three months after Jason’s death, is not an experience she enjoys discussing, especially when she’s having such a good day so far.)

“The first time I got drunk was at a party there,” Toni says as they walk past an apartment block. “I drank half a bottle of Jack, threw it all back up and then passed out in the bathtub. Jughead had to carry me home. Not my finest moment, took me years to regain my taste for bourbon.”

“Your first party and you went straight for the hard liquor? Impressive,” Cheryl laughs. “My first high school party was at Chuck Clayton’s, I had one too many wine coolers and thought it was a great idea to join in with the game of Seven Minutes of Heaven that Veronica insisted on.”

“Oh really?” Toni grins. “Who was your lucky suitor? Would I have known them?”

“Unfortunately.” Cheryl grimaces. “Dilton Doiley had the pleasure of spending the best seven minutes of his life in a cramped hall closet with yours truly.”

Toni howls with laughter for a good five minutes.

“Next on our walking tour of the south side is the legend, the myth, the dumpsite that is...” Toni trails off dramatically as they turn a corner to be met with a large metal sign with peeling red paint that says _welcome to Southside High_. It’s a tall, foreboding red brick building with a hefty amount of graffiti covering its walls, surrounded by a chain link fence.

“Hm,” Cheryl hums, trying to figure out how best to articulate her opinion without offending Toni too much. “Looks just like a school whose faculty would think it’s a brilliant idea to put on a production of West Side Story, a musical featuring a literal gang war, and not foresee any problems that might arise from that.”

“It’s a shithole,” Toni laughs. “Good riddance to it. Now as we continue down this street, if you look to your right you will see the first ever alley I got beat up in.”

A few blocks over from Southside High, Toni comes to a halt in front of a surprisingly cheery and cosy looking cafe. “Welcome to Santiago’s Sweets. The best coffee in Riverdale, and honestly, the milkshakes give Pop’s a run for his money.”

Toni insists on paying, seeing as how Cheryl had paid for breakfast at Pop’s, and a few minutes later they’re exiting the cafe with two coffees in bright pink takeaway cups and Toni inhaling a croissant at an alarming pace.

“How did you come across this place?” Cheryl asks after swallowing a bite of her own croissant, that Toni practically forced her into getting since apparently everything Santiago’s Sweets does is _like, the best in Riverdale, you just never knew about it cause it’s on the south side_.

“I had a job as a waitress here for a few months when I was sixteen,” Toni says, brushing crumbs off the front of her shirt and Cheryl resists the urge to smack herself in the face with her croissant at how cute she finds the action. “The aprons were purple, the shirts were blue and this was when I had first dyed my hair pink. I looked like a walking bisexual flag.”

They walk along in silence for a little while, Cheryl contemplating something while Toni finishes devouring her croissant.

“How did you know?” Cheryl asks eventually. “That you were inclined towards girls as well?”

“I kinda always knew,” Toni shrugs easily. “My first couple of kisses were all with guys, and I enjoyed them. Well, as much as you can enjoy a teenage boy slobbering all over you with absolutely no finesse. I had my first kiss with a girl when I was sixteen. There were a few out lesbians at Southside High, and one of them, _Carmen_ her name was, took an interest in me after we got paired together in an English assignment.”

“How very romcom worthy,” Cheryl interjects.

“Oh, absolutely. I already knew I was bisexual at this point, but I wasn’t really out to anyone except Jughead, so I think she thought I was just a harmless straight girl for her to flirt with. I saw her at a party one night and I’d had just enough vodka to have the courage to flirt back, and then ten seconds later _bam_ I’m in a hall closet with her tongue down my throat.”

Cheryl snorts. “I rescind my romcom comment.”

“Yeah, I would say it was more Pornhub worthy.”

Cheryl splutters, nearly inhaling her coffee through her nose while Toni hoots with laughter.

“Delightful. Good to see being back on your home turf rids you of any decorum you pretend to have and returns you to your true delinquent self.”

“You’re the one willingly spending your afternoon with this delinquent, on _my_ home turf as you put it.”

“I’m beginning to regret that decision,” Cheryl grumbles, ignoring the way Toni feigns offence. “Did you ever struggle with it?” She asks, eager to get the subject away from whatever happened in that hall closet that it warrants the lecherous grin on Toni’s face. “Your sexuality?”

“Not particularly,” Toni says, just as easily. “There were a few dumb comments obviously, homophobia is still alive and well in Riverdale, and my uncle was definitely not a fan of my persuasions, but it was never really an issue for me. When I told Jughead, all he said was no one in Riverdale, male or female, was good enough for me anyway and then asked if I wanted to go get a burger at Pop’s.”

Cheryl is hit with a stab of jealousy at how smooth Toni’s coming out experience had been in contrast to her own.

“I know I’m lucky in that regard," Toni says softly. "I wish we all had it that easy.”

“So do I,” Cheryl murmurs, and not for the first time she wonders how different her life would be if she had a mother that actually cared about her.

“Hey.” Toni’s voice stops her from going too far down that rabbit hole. “You’re here now. You had a much harder road but you still made it. I’m proud of you, Cher.”

“Thanks,” Cheryl says, smiling when Toni bumps into her shoulder affectionately.

Their seemingly aimless wandering through the south side pauses when Toni stops outside of a tiny pizza place, dawdling on the sidewalk and staring at the storefront with a distant expression.

“And what interesting piece of Toni’s south side history involves Marco’s Pizza?”

It’s meant to sound light and cheerful, Cheryl hoping the look on Toni’s face didn’t mean someone got stabbed or arrested or something here, but her hopes are shot down when Toni smiles tightly. “The last time I saw my dad we went here.”

Oh. Cheryl wasn’t expecting that. “When was this?”

“About three years ago,” Toni says flatly.

Colour Cheryl intrigued. “You don’t see him often?”

“Nope,” Toni replies, throwing the napkin from her croissant into the bin sitting outside the pizza place and starting to walk again. “He lives in Chicago now, which is apparently not only too far away to travel to see his only daughter but also too far to bother calling more than once every six months.”

Cheryl knows she shouldn’t prod Toni to keep talking, but she can’t help the curiosity that’s been lingering ever since Toni breezed over talking about her dad at Budget Pop’s. Sure, she was there while it was happening, but she was only there for six months of the resulting fallout. Something like that stays with you a lot longer than half a year. She didn’t even know Toni was back in contact with her father.

It’s not her place to be nosey and impatient, so she knows not to push, and instead just lets Toni know she’s there for her.

“I might not be an expert on fathers who leave of their own volition, but I like to think I have the market covered on overall shitty parents,” Cheryl says gently. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But if you ever need to, I’m always available to listen.”

Toni sighs. “No it’s fine, I— I probably should talk about it more than I do. It’s hardly healthy, bottling everything up like that. And you’re probably the best person to confide it.”

Cheryl blinks. She’s been called a lot of things, but a confidential candidate is a first. The surprise must show on her face, since Toni speaks up again to explain.

“The boys can all sympathise with having either a shitty dad or an absent one. Sweet Pea’s died when he was a kid, Fangs’ is in prison on armed robbery charges, and while Jughead’s dad is sober now, he had a lot of issues with alcoholism when Jug was a kid.”

Toni pauses to take a sip of her coffee.

“Obviously they know what happened with my parents, but it’s easier for them to just hate him, say he’s an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s missing out on by not taking an interest in my life, because they never knew him. They just know him as the asshole father who stopped loving my mom and didn’t love me enough to make an effort.”

Cheryl’s heart aches at the hurt Toni tries and fails to hide in her voice.

“I’m not saying they’re wrong, because they’re totally right that he’s an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s missing out on, but he’s also my dad," Toni says wistfully. "And _you_ knew him. He was the one who taught both of us how to ride a bike. He was the one who built bonfires in the backyard and helped us make s’mores every summer. He was the one who helped us build that enormous snow fort in the backyard when we were eleven.”

It dawns on Cheryl what Toni's trying to explain. ”It’s hard to let go of the good memories, even when the bad ones outweigh it."

“Exactly,” Toni says, giving Cheryl a small smile. “But, there’s only so many cancelled visits and missed birthdays and dodged phone calls that I could take before I just gave up hope and accepted that he didn’t want to try. Every time I’ve actually seen him since the divorce, it’s felt like he’s only doing it out of obligation, rather than actually wanting to spend time with his own daughter. And I just figured why should I keep putting in effort when he doesn’t do the same?”

“It’s his loss,” Cheryl says. “If he doesn’t want to know the wonderful, exceptional person you’ve become, then that’s on him.”

“My—” Toni pauses for long enough that it prompts Cheryl into their inside go-to comfort method. Toni sighs when she squeezes her pinky around Cheryl’s. “My mom admitted to me once that when she got pregnant with me, my dad wanted her to get rid of it. Get rid of me, I guess.”

Cheryl’s eyes go wide. Mr Topaz had never been the most present of parents; he worked at Riverdale General so being on call a lot resulted in long work hours, but she would never have thought he was capable of thoughts like that.

“It was in the midst of a drug fuelled bender, so who knows if she was even telling the truth or not, but it definitely stuck with me for a while,” Toni says, and Cheryl wonders if it’s too dramatic to track down Mr Topaz to tear into him with all her sixteen year old wrath for making Toni sad. “So when my parents split up, I guess my dad saw it as his ticket out of fatherhood.”

Cheryl flails a bit for an appropriate response. “Well, you are always welcome at the next meeting of Shitty Dads Anonymous.”

Toni snorts in an adorably endearing way before she laughs. “The _what_?”

“Shitty Dads Anonymous,” Cheryl repeats, that odd warmth blooming in her chest again at the knowledge she’s made Toni laugh. “Every now and then, Josie, Veronica and I will get blind drunk on the cheapest wine we can procure, and bemoan our respective fathers. It’s surprisingly cathartic, and worth the hangover headache the next day.”

“Shitty Dads Anonymous,” Toni chuckles. “You know I might just take you up on that offer.”

Toni’s grand tour of the south side, Cheryl finds out as they turn the corner at the end of the street, culminates at Sunnyside Trailer Park.

“Home sweet home,” Toni says, a touch sarcastically as they pass the faded sign proclaiming  _home of the Southside Serpents_.

Toni leads her through the trailer park, waving hello to a few people sitting outside their own trailers, all sporting Serpent jackets and looking curiously at Cheryl, before she arrives at a trailer with a wind chime hanging from the porch roof and a few potted plants sitting by the base of the small set of stairs. Cheryl isn’t really sure what to expect when Toni unlocks the door and leads her inside, but it turns out to be perfectly adequate.

It’s bigger than Cheryl was expecting, a small kitchen off to the right with a table and three wooden chairs, all with different coloured cushions on them, tucked into the corner of the room. There’s a small TV perched on a stand, the remote sitting on the coffee table next to a newspaper and an empty mug, and a slightly worn-out looking sofa against the wall facing the TV.

It’s quite cosy, if Cheryl’s being honest. It also feels more like a home than Thornhill ever did, with its dark corridors and empty rooms and Penelope or Clifford lurking behind every corner waiting to reprimand Cheryl for the slightest thing.

“So,” Cheryl says. “Am I getting the grand tour of Chez Topaz or not?”

Toni snorts. “Can’t imagine it will take very long, but sure.”

To the left of the front door is a hallway, and Toni leads her down it and points to each of the three doors. “That’s the bathroom, that’s my uncle’s room, and this one is mine.”

Toni’s bedroom is at the end of the hall, big enough for a bed, a dresser, a tiny desk and an even tinier nightstand. There’s fairy lights strung over the bed, and the entire left-hand side wall is covered with photographs. Photographs all taken by Toni, Cheryl realises as she steps closer to them.

Jughead features prominently in them, and there’s quite a few with an older man wearing a Serpent jacket and a younger girl wearing a beanie similar to Jughead’s who Toni tells her are FP and Jellybean Jones.

After meeting Sweet Pea and Fangs, Cheryl doesn’t find _Jellybean_ too shocking.

There’s a lot of photos of Riverdale’s scenery, pictures of Pop’s and Sweetwater River and Southside High, and there’s one of Jughead and Toni at the town boundary, parked on their motorcycles underneath the _the town with pep!_ sign, and Cheryl decides to think about the fact Toni can apparently ride a motorbike some other time, when said motorbike-rider is not two feet away from her, in a room that suddenly feels quite small.

She catches sight of bright red, and her breath gets caught in her throat as she recognises the face of her own thirteen year old self grinning back at her, Jason and Toni either side of her. The photo is faded, and there’s a small tear in the bottom left corner, but Cheryl remembers the Spring Break they spent at the Blossom lake house like it was yesterday.

“So, what’s your highly anticipated verdict?” Toni asks, appearing at Cheryl’s shoulder as she continues to look over the collection, catching sight of herself in a few of the older photographs. “I’m sure you’re just dying to say something about claustrophobia acting up in small houses or something.”

Cheryl hums thoughtfully. “I suppose it’s not the Five Seasons, but it’s acceptable. It’s very...authentic.”

Toni rolls her eyes, ducking out of the doorway and walking back to the living room. “You can take the girl out of the north side…”

/

As much as she’s been trying to ignore it for the past month since Toni came back into her life like a whirlwind, Cheryl recognises the signs of a crush with dismay; the flutter in her stomach whenever Toni smiles or laughs, the way her skins tingles for far too long after Toni has touched her to be considered innocently platonic, the way her heart stutters erratically each time Toni hugs her and the way her perfume makes Cheryl the kind of dizzy only half a bottle of champagne should be able to accomplish.

She resolves herself to just ignoring this inopportune crush until it takes the hint and fizzles out. It’s hardly the most bulletproof of plans, but she doesn’t want to lose Toni as a friend, which is almost certainly what will happen if Toni ever finds out about her not-so-platonic feelings. Therefore, she will keep her mouth shut, and act her heart out pretending that she has no interest in Toni beyond the camaraderie borne of reunited childhood friends.

An hour later, Betty puts a significant dent in those plans.

“So,” Betty says far too casually as she slips back into the booth across from Cheryl at Pop’s. “You and Toni.”

Cheryl pauses, a ketchup-covered fry halfway to her mouth. “You and Veronica.” At Betty’s raised eyebrow, Cheryl continues. “I’m sorry, are we not just randomly naming two friends?”

“She was glued to your side the entire time last night, and you only had eyes for her. The only two people I’ve ever seen you smile genuinely at are Josie and Veronica. And now Toni.” Betty pauses for dramatic effect, and Cheryl considers dousing her with the bottle of maple syrup sitting on the table. “You like her, don’t you?”

“Taking that investigative journalism degree a little too far here, Veronica Mars.”

“Deflection. The classic Cheryl Blossom tactic.” Betty’s grin only gets wider when Cheryl glares at her. “Followed up by the other classic tactic of murderous glaring.”

Sometimes Cheryl forgets how well Betty knows her.

“Have you told her?”

“God no,” Cheryl snorts, accepting her fate of having to talk about this. All she wanted was to treat her cousin to their twice-yearly tradition of a birthday lunch at Pop’s before she returned to Rockland City with the others, and instead she’s being interrogated by Betty about _feelings._

“Why not?”

Cheryl jabs a fry into her ketchup with a bit more force than strictly necessary. “Do you remember your unfortunate short-lived crush on Drew Rodriguez in high school?”

Betty gets a particularly constipated look on her face that entertains Cheryl immensely. “Vividly. Mostly because you like to periodically remind me.”

“And do you remember getting the brilliant idea to inform him of your feelings? How did that go for you?”

“Point taken. But you’re _Cheryl Blossom_. I didn’t think you’d be the type to be scared of rejection.”

Cheryl bristles. She knows Betty doesn’t mean it like _that_ , but Cheryl has spent her entire life dealing with rejection. From her parents who lost the wrong twin, from the minions at school who didn’t really like _her_ , they just liked the comfortable position on the social ladder being in her orbit brought them, from Heather pulling away and telling Cheryl that she’s just _too much_.

She takes a second to reign herself in. She isn’t That Cheryl anymore; she can’t just throw a bitchy tantrum in the middle of Pop’s because someone hit a nerve. “I hope you can recognise your attempts to goad me for what they are: utterly futile. I am not telling Toni, and _you_ are not telling anyone. Keep this to yourself, Cousin Betty, or I will make life very miserable for you.”

“We’re not sixteen anymore Cheryl. You don’t scare me.” Cheryl calls upon all of her high school terrorising skills and levels her best HBIC glare at Betty, who quickly amends her statement. “Okay fine, you don’t scare me that much.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Cheryl says, plastering on an acidic smile that indicates she is done talking about this. “Now, I am going to forget this conversation ever happened, and I suggest you do too.”

“If that’s what you want, then sure. But for the record, it’s not just you I was watching. The way Toni was looking at you last night when she thought no one was paying attention…” Betty trails off meaningfully and Cheryl feels her heart skip a beat. “I don’t think your feelings are as unrequited as you think they are.”

Betty says it so easily, shrugging nonchalantly and going back to her burger, like she hasn’t just knocked Cheryl’s entire world slightly off-kilter. This frivolous little infatuation she’s developed, she’s spent so much time actively trying to ignore it, she’s never actually entertained the idea that it could be mutual.

Betty’s words linger in her mind the rest of the day, and she spends the four hours back to Rockland City trying not read too much into the few times she looks over at Toni and finds her already looking back.

Damn Betty Cooper. Planting false hope that Cheryl just can’t _quite_ shake.


	3. in the corner of my lovesick thoughts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello friends, first of all i would like to apologise for the length of time it took me to finish this. my manager at work quit outta nowhere last month and i was the unlucky one that got saddled with extra hours, which unfortunately did not leave me a ton of time to write.
> 
> secondly, we have arrived at The Jason Chapter so content warnings include: character death, emotional abuse, suicidal thoughts and attempted suicide. nothing super graphic, but it's all in the **then** section if you want to skip any of it. on a happier note, this chapter also features drunk toni, gay panic cheryl, meddling josie and some archosie crumbs.
> 
> third, this chapter is sponsored by the carrie musical. unsuspecting hearts is a choni anthem, and that is THAT.
> 
> chapter title from ease my mind by hayley kiyoko, and you can find me on tumblr [here](http://lauracarmillas.tumblr.com).

**THEN.**

Cheryl is fifteen when her whole world crumbles.

One moment she’s sitting next to Jason in the back seat of her father’s Porsche, laughing at the lame joke Jason has just told, and the next there is smoke and fire and screaming and all she can feel is unfathomable pain.

When she comes to in the hospital room, it’s to the sound of anguished sobbing. She can’t explain it, but she just knows that Jason’s gone before a nurse even notices she’s awake, before her mother even tells her what happened. There’s an all-consuming empty pain running through her whole body that she’s certain has nothing to do with the crash, and when all her mother can stutter out is  _your brother, he didn’t..._ before she’s burying her face into Clifford’s shoulder and sobbing again, Cheryl wishes she had never woken up.

The weeks following Jason’s death are kind of a blur.

Cheryl sits between Betty and Penelope during the funeral, and Betty doesn’t make a peep when Cheryl spends the whole time gripping her hand so tightly she’s probably in danger of breaking some of Betty’s fingers. Cheryl doesn’t cry during the funeral,  _can’t_ cry, still too numb and in shock to do anything but stare blankly ahead at the casket containing the still form of her brother.

Of course, her mother notices the lack of tears, waiting until after everyone has left the wake at Thornhill to tear into Cheryl.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, Cheryl,” she hisses, glaring at Cheryl with nothing but contempt in her eyes. “What kind of loveless monster doesn’t shed a single tear for the death of their twin brother?”

It isn’t until three days after the funeral that the dam finally breaks. It’s late, and Cheryl’s shifting around in her bed trying to get comfortable and being thwarted by the inconvenient cast on her arm, when she realises that amid the  _get well soon_ and  _we love you, Cheryl!_ messages scrawled onto her cast by Veronica and Betty and various other Vixens, there’s an empty space on the inside of the wrist. Cheryl stares at it; she hadn’t even realised she was subconsciously saving a space for Jason to write on her cast.

It hits her then, really and truly hits her, right in the gut like a suckerpunch. Jason is gone. He’s never coming home. He’s never going to make captain of the football team. He’s never going to get to graduate. He’s never going to go to college and study architecture like he’d made up his mind on doing since he and Cheryl were eight years old. He’s never going to get to walk Cheryl down the aisle, he’s never going to get to meet the love of his own life, he’s never going to get to grow old and remind Cheryl when they’re both ninety and in a care home that, “I’m four minutes older than you, Cher-Bear, that makes me your  _big_ brother.”

She doesn’t go to school for a week. She barely eats. She barely sleeps. When she tries to, it’s in one of Jason’s old sweaters, the red cashmere one that was always a bit too big for him so it’s comically large on Cheryl, pushing her face into the sleeve and letting Jason’s familiar scent tear the scab off so she can feel the pain all over again. If she stops, if she lets the wound close over and tries to stop hurting, she’s terrified she’ll start to forget him.

Penelope and Clifford take their grief out on Cheryl, lashing out at her over the smallest things. Being compared to Jason and constantly coming in second is something she’s always just soldiered through and brushed off, but now that Jason is no longer there to act as a buffer between Cheryl and her parents, it increases tenfold.

When she had Jason to hold her and tell her how wonderful she is and remind her that he loved her, Cheryl always felt bulletproof, even against the most hollow-point of Penelope’s scathing comments. It turns out that she isn’t.

She manages to hold it together in public for the most part. At least for a little while.

The Back To School dance is dedicated to Jason, which Cheryl makes an appearance at for two hours before bowing out and going home to miss Jason in peace, and the school holds a pep rally in his honour prior to the next football game, Riverdale Bulldogs hosting the Greendale Raptors.

With her broken arm benching her from the Vixens for at least six weeks, Cheryl watches the Vixens’ routine, led by the current captain Maria Reyes and the interim vice-captain Veronica, from the bleachers. Her parents are not in attendance, which doesn’t particularly surprise her. Deep down she knew they only attended every game in freshman year because Jason was on the football team, not because Cheryl was on the cheerleading squad. 

After assuring Principal Weatherbee that she’s  _perfectly capable of public speaking, thank you very much,_ Cheryl gives a little speech in the brief interval before the two teams take to the pitch, about how much Jason loved everyone and wouldn’t want them to spend the year mourning.

“Jason was, and always will be, my soulmate,” Cheryl says, her voice wavering on the past tense she now has to get used to using when referring to Jason, and manages to hold it together until she’s stepped down off the stage, before she breaks and runs as fast as she can to the locker room.

Collapsing onto one of the benches, she sobs until her eyes sting and her waterproof mascara is streaked down her face and her throat feels like it’s closing up. Cheryl didn’t even know it was possible to miss someone this much, so much that it physically hurts.

She’s distantly aware of someone — Veronica, she realises eventually, with Betty hovering nervously in the background — coming up behind her and placing a hand on her back, but she can’t stop. She turns and flings herself into Veronica’s arms, who murmurs some platitudes about Cheryl not being alone, which— the sentiment is nice, but it’s not true. 

Jason is dead. He’s gone.

Cheryl is alone. 

Around her, life goes on. Betty follows in her mother’s footsteps and starts a school newspaper, naming it the Blue and Gold. Veronica becomes official with Chuck, after an entire year of heartfelt pining and unsubtly sneaking glances at each other across classrooms. Tina dates Jackson and then Ginger dates Jackson and there’s a particularly bizarre week where Cheryl thinks they might all be dating each other. Despite her broken arm, Maria demands Cheryl co-host auditions for the Vixens alongside her, much to Veronica’s annoyance, and Midge Klump, Sabrina Spellman and Evelyn Evernever are added to the ranks.

The pain comes and goes in waves. Cheryl will be  _fine_ one minute, and then the next she’ll be automatically turning to her right to dispense some sarcastic comment or make a joke to Jason in the instance before reality smacks her in the face and reminds her that she doesn’t have him anymore, and she wishes for a split second that the universe hadn’t spared her in that accident, just so she wouldn’t have to feel this constant emptiness.

It feels like someone has carved Cheryl’s heart right out of her body, and somehow she’s survived, but nobody can see the gaping wound in her chest.

Everyone keeps  _staring_ at her. Wondering if she’s okay, waiting for her to break. What they don’t seem to realise is what they’re waiting for is never going to happen. How can she possibly break when she’s already broken?

Weeks pass, and she wonders when people will stop seeing her as the girl with the dead brother.

One day in late October, she’s half-listening to Veronica gossiping with Betty about a beanie-wearing Serpent she spotted at Pop’s the previous night who would be _undoubtedly your type, Betts, and you’d have that whole star-crossed Romeo and Juliet thing going on_ , and out of nowhere she wonders if the news of the tragic accident that claimed the life of fifteen year old Jason Blossom made its way to the south side.

She wonders if Toni knows Jason is dead, and for the first time in years, she wishes she still had her former best friend. Of course, she has Veronica and Betty to turn to, but it isn't the same. Betty only tolerates her due to familial ties and Veronica is more rival than friend. It’s nothing like the connection she had with Toni, who always knew when to just stay quiet and hold Cheryl tightly and when to talk and fill the silence to distract Cheryl whenever she was upset.

It’s a foolish infantile thought — Toni probably doesn’t even think of her anymore.

Toni is gone, Jason is gone. Maybe Cheryl is just one of those people for whom happiness is not in the cards.

Maybe she’s better off alone.

(Maybe the world would just be better off without her.)

Cheryl’s sixteenth birthday falls on a Sunday.

Her mother has opened the liquor cupboard by noon, and by three in the afternoon she’s loose-lipped enough to stare at Cheryl emotionlessly and tell her  _I would trade you for Jason in a heartbeat_. Cheryl takes a leaf out of Penelope’s book, and gets a quarter of the way through a bottle of vodka before the emptiness gnawing away at her becomes too much for her to handle.

 _Who will the Grim Reaper take next?_  Her mother had muttered earlier just as Cheryl was leaving the room.  _Better the sweet hereafter than this awful limbo._

Her phone has been buzzing every now and then over the course of the day, and as she’s getting ready to go out, she checks it out of half-drunk curiosity. There’s a slew of banal  _happy birthday_ messages, ones from Ginger and Tina and her other inner circle minions along the lines of  _happy birthday, I hope you’re doing okay_ , and there’s one novel-length one from Veronica that gives Cheryl pause.

_I would say happy birthday, but I don’t want to be presumptuous and think this day is a happy one for you. I’m not going to pretend to understand how you must feel, but despite our ups and downs, I do consider you a friend Cheryl, so if you need anything today, anything at all, I’m here for you. Just say the word and I can be en route to Thornhill. xo V_

She replies to Veronica’s text and then switches off her phone, tucking it under her pillow before she exits her bedroom.

_Thanks for trying. I’m going to be with Jason now._

Everything after she reaches the river is a little blurry.

She remembers the freezing December air, seeping through her clothes and chilling her to the bone. She remembers the sound of the ice cracking and the immediate numbness from the frigid water. She remembers seeing Chuck’s distorted face through the ice and hearing Veronica and Betty’s screaming. She remembers the instant regret, realising what a terrible mistake she’s made.

She doesn’t want to die.

She doesn’t remember Chuck grabbing her just before the current caught her and heaving her out of the water. She doesn’t remember being carried back to Chuck’s car and being taken back to The Pembrooke. She doesn’t remember Veronica and Betty arguing with Chuck that if they take Cheryl to the hospital, the doctors are legally obligated to notify her parents, and Penelope and Clifford getting involved will just turn things from bad to worse.

Now that she’s fully regained awareness of her surroundings, Cheryl finds herself at The Pembrooke, curled up in front of the fireplace with a blanket monogrammed with Veronica’s initials and Chuck’s letterman jacket around her shoulders.

“Hey.” Veronica reappears next to her, pressing a warm mug into her hands. “Hot chocolate, with a little splash of peppermint liqueur.”

“Thank you,” Cheryl murmurs, her throat still too sore from the icy water to say much else.

“Are you warm enough?” Veronica asks, already reaching for one of the standby blankets sitting in a pile next to them.

“I’m fine, Vee.”

Veronica stares at her like she wants to argue. “You can stay here tonight, if you want,” she says instead.

Cheryl’s too exhausted to point out that they’re not even friends. Not really. “What about your parents?”

“My dad’s in Montréal for the week and my mom’s out for a business dinner. She won’t be back for hours,” Veronica replies, fussing with the blanket and tucking it around Cheryl. “She’ll be fine with it.”

Cheryl just nods. The idea of going back home to the empty halls of Thornhill, where Clifford and Penelope are in who knows what state, is more unappealing than usual. Veronica says something about setting up the spare room for her, and she starts to get up before she pauses.

“Cheryl.” Veronica repeats her name until Cheryl turns to look at her. “I know our friendship is… tempestuous at best and nonexistent at worst—” Cheryl almost smiles at that, because the version of Veronica that acknowledges their frenemies status is more familiar than this caring and concerned version of Veronica. “—but you’re not alone, Cheryl. Not with this.”

Cheryl still doesn’t have the strength to disagree. In a week’s time the Breakfast Club trio will have forgotten this ever happened. Betty will go back to rolling her eyes whenever Cheryl opens her mouth, Chuck will go back to pretending Cheryl doesn’t exist, and Veronica will go back to communicating with Cheryl exclusively in snide catty comments.

The four of them will collectively pretend this day never happened, and oddly enough, Cheryl realises she’s fine with that. All she wants is to forget this day ever happened. Her parents never find out. Cheryl isn’t too bothered; she knows they would only rebuke her for not finishing the job properly.

For Christmas, Nana Rose gives her a spider brooch, an old Blossom heirloom that’s somehow both creepy and fascinating, and that’s the catalyst for Cheryl realising that being a good girl is vastly overrated.

The devastation and emptiness she felt after losing Jason… She never wants to feel that way again.

 _People can’t hurt you if you hurt them first_ , she rationalises, as she stalks down the hallways of Riverdale High the first day back from winter break, clad in her Vixens outfit for the first time since the Fairview Academy game, the crowd parting for her like the Red Sea.

Cheryl claws her way from vice-captain of the Vixens to co-captain —  _you graduate at the end of this year_ , she tells Maria icily,  _your days as captain are numbered so where’s the harm in giving me a head start? —_  her skirts get shorter and her heels get taller, she perfects the art of delivering vicious insults with a condescending smirk, and by the end of sophomore year she’s learned how to hide her feelings, how to be completely unaffected by people muttering  _crazy bitch_ under their breath at her, how to wear her now signature red lipstick and iconic spider brooch as armour.

Cheryl finally has everything she’s wanted in high school — popularity, looks, the adoration and more importantly the fear of her peers — and she’s never felt more lonely.

 

**NOW.**

Whatever her traitorous and hopeless heart started back in Riverdale, it has not passed like Cheryl had hoped. In fact, it’s gotten worse, despite Cheryl’s best attempts to talk herself out of it.

Whenever she’s not daydreaming about tearfully confessing her feelings to Toni and having them just as tearfully returned before a very dramatic kiss in the rain like they’re two characters in a Lifetime movie —  _ugh_ , Cheryl knows she’s got it bad when she’s thinking in terms of ridiculous romantic clichés — she’s thinking about soppy relationship nonsense, like waking Toni up with soft kisses in the morning before making her breakfast in bed, or holding hands while walking through Pickens Park, or watching Toni’s face light up when Cheryl shows up at her apartment with a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne because she knows how to woo a lady.

Having a crush is exhausting, Cheryl decides. And  _impractical_. She’s too busy musing on the location of Toni’s Serpent tattoo and trying not to combust in the middle of Starbucks when she realises it must be somewhere hidden by Toni’s clothes to realise that she’s completely zoned out and Toni is waiting expectantly for an answer to the question that Cheryl was not paying the slightest bit of attention to.

“Sorry, what?” Cheryl says, internally scolding herself when Toni poking her in the arm finally grabs her attention.  _Get a grip_ , her brain snarks at her heart, _remember what happened the last time you let your crush on a pretty girl take over your life?_

“I asked if you wanted another drink,” Toni chuckles, rummaging around in her bag until she locates her purse. “I’m surprised your laptop hasn’t burst into flames considering how hard you were staring at it. Maybe you should take a little break before you kickstart your dormant pyrokinesis.”

Yes. The word document on her laptop’s screen that currently has the date and title typed in is what Cheryl was focusing on. Absolutely.

“Uh, sure. Same again please.” Cheryl says, and tries not to stare at Toni’s ass as she gets up and walks over to the Starbucks counter.

Quite how only Betty appears to have picked up on it is beyond Cheryl; she feels like she has a giant flashing neon sign pointing at her that says  _I have a huge gay crush on my best friend_ half the time she spends with Toni.

Perhaps that's the problem: that she’s spending so much time with Toni. She’s never going to be able to begin the arduous process of getting over Toni Topaz when she’s an almost constant presence in Cheryl's life.

(And while she will probably be the first person in history to ever accomplish such a task, she  _will_ get over this inconvenient crush.)

Of course, the absolute last thing that Cheryl wants is to pull too far away from Toni and end up losing her again. The logical solution presents itself just as Toni is making her way back to their table tucked into the corner of Starbucks: less one-on-one time with Toni, and more time with her in a group setting.

When it’s just the two of them, there’s nothing to distract Cheryl from reflecting on her feelings. At least if there’s other people around, whenever her heart starts beating a little too fast at the sound of Toni’s laugh, she can ignore Toni and focus her attention on Josie or Veronica or whoever.

It’s kind of a long shot, but hopefully the irksome little torch she’s carrying will take a hint and extinguish itself. It just so happens that Cheryl has the perfect opportunity to test out this theory.

“Would I be correct in assuming you remember Josie?” Cheryl asks once Toni has returned to her chair opposite Cheryl.

Toni laughs, sliding one of the two mugs she’s holding across the table to Cheryl. “Daffodil keeps trying to put The One That Got Away by Katy Perry on the jukebox at the Wyrm, so yes, she has left an impression.”

Cheryl must remember to make fun of Josie for that a few more times before her and Archie get over themselves and inevitably become official. “What are you doing this weekend?”

Toni looks intrigued. “I’m working Friday night, but I’m not doing anything on Saturday. Why?”

“I assume you’ve seen the cavalcade of flyers decorating campus that are advertising the charity showcase the music department is hosting this weekend?” Toni nods, and Cheryl continues. “The tickets are sold out, but since Josie and her band The Pussycats are one of the headlining acts, she has bestowed a few extra tickets on me, should I feel the need to distribute them to any promising contenders.”

“Do I count as a promising contender?” Toni grins. “Or would you like me to pass one along to Daffodil on Josie’s behalf?”

Cheryl snorts. “Just yourself, please. Although…” She trails off, casting a critical eye over Toni’s outfit. “We might have to do something about your attire.”

“What’s wrong with the way I dress?” Toni objects.

“J’adore your flannel-mesh aesthetic, I’m simply suggesting that you augment it slightly for the occasion.” Cheryl reaches out to brush some fluff off the sleeve of Toni’s Serpent jacket. ”Perhaps ditch the leather.”

“Excuse me,” Toni splutters in mock offence. “When have you ever seen a Serpent without her skin? That’s like you without your red lipstick. Or Jughead without his beanie. Or Veronica without her pearls. Or—“

“I get the point, TT,” Cheryl interrupts with a fond chuckle. “Would you like to attend or not?”

“Sure, I’ll be your date, Bombshell.” Cheryl tries to postpone her heart attack at the word  _date_ long enough to listen to the rest of Toni’s sentence. “I’ll even make an effort to spruce up my unkempt appearance.  _If_ you make sure to keep next Saturday free for my birthday.”

Cheryl had been wondering about Toni’s plans for her upcoming twenty-first. Perhaps a little presumptuously, she had assumed that whatever the plans were, Toni would extend an invitation to her. It warms her to discover that her assumptions had been correct.

“It won’t be anything too chaotic, just a Serpent party at the Wyrm to celebrate me finally being old enough to legally drink the alcohol I serve in that place,” Toni continues. “Josie, Veronica and Reggie are all invited as well, same goes for Josie’s not-boyfriend depending on if she’s grown a pair by then or not. Having them with you might help you not stick out like a sore manicured thumb.”

Cheryl frowns at her bright red nails. “Are you making fun of my manicure?”

“Of course not,” Toni says innocently. “Just saying that, as much as I like  _your_ crimson-couture aesthetic, you might need to augment it slightly for the occasion. Perhaps ditch the Louboutins.”

“For your information, these boots are Balenciaga,” Cheryl grumbles, and Toni’s mischievous grin turns into full-blown laughing.

She knows Toni is just teasing her, but she takes the bait anyway, only half-listening to Toni making fun of her and calling her a label-whore while she starts cataloguing her entire wardrobe in her mind, beginning the formidable operation of putting together an outfit that wouldn’t make her look out of place on a motorcycle.

If Toni wants potential gang member Cheryl Blossom, then that is who she’s going to get.

/

On Tuesdays, Veronica and Josie both have nine AM classes, while Cheryl doesn’t have her weekly art history lecture until the afternoon, so she takes advantage of not being woken up by Josie singing in the shower or Veronica making a racket in the kitchen by sleeping in until just past ten in the morning.

Far later than her usual routine, but it’s only one day of the week. Opportunities where she can switch off her alarm and go back to sleep without the background noise of Josie making her way through the entire Phantom of The Opera soundtrack or Veronica fighting with the coffee machine that she refuses to get rid of because  _it’s vintage, Cheryl!_ are few and far between.

(“It’s a piece of junk, Vee,” Josie had stated flatly one day when the coffee machine was having a mid-life crisis and refusing to turn on, and Veronica had locked her out of the apartment for two hours.)

By the time she’s had a shower, made herself a late breakfast and then started to get ready to head out, it’s almost noon. She’s just finished fixing her hair and is about to start on her makeup when Josie gets home, immediately sauntering into Cheryl’s room uninvited and jumping up onto her bed.

“So, I bumped into your new bestie in the library earlier,” Josie says casually, and Cheryl nearly stabs herself in the eye with her mascara brush. “She mentioned you gifted one of my elusive showcase tickets to her.”

It’s phrased entirely innocently, but Cheryl’s never heard a more loaded sentence in her life. She can already tell what Josie’s angling at here, so decides to be annoying and play dumb. “So what if I did?”

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with her recently,” Josie says, just as casually, like she’s trying to make a point. “I didn’t realise you two were so close. You know, it took you much longer than this to defrost when  _we_ first met.”

It would sound like an accusation, if Josie was the kind of person who held grudges like that. Also if she didn’t have her patented  _I-know-there’s-something-you’re-not-telling-me-Cheryl-Marjorie-Blossom_ smirk on her face.

“Yes, well, Toni has a seven year head start on you,” Cheryl replies, ignoring Josie and concentrating on not ruining her mascara. “Once upon a time, we were best friends, and now we have almost a decade of missed time to catch up on.”

Josie hums thoughtfully, and is blissfully silent for a minute while Cheryl puts the finishing touches to her makeup, before she opens her mouth again.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?” Is what Josie changes the subject to, and Cheryl bites back a groan because she knows exactly where this conversation is leading. “And she’s got that whole bad girl with a dangerous vibe thing down to a tee. It’s no wonder she has half the campus fawning over her.”

Cheryl clenches her jaw, trying to ignore the surge of jealousy at the thought of any of those lesser plebeians even thinking they’re remotely good enough for Toni.

“If this is your way of telling me you’re interested in batting for the other team, I’ll put in a good word for you.”

“Mm, thanks but she’s not really my type,” Josie says airily, and an evil glint in her eye is Cheryl’s only warning that Josie’s about to call her out in that way only a best friend can. “She is yours though, isn’t she?”

“Josie, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” Cheryl grumbles, continuing her valiant act of playing dumb and pretending to fix some nonexistent smudges of lipstick. “But if you plan on arriving at an actual point anytime this decade, arrive there now because I have a class to attend.”

“Cheryl,” Josie states, and something about the way she says Cheryl’s name indicates that  _this_ is the point Josie has been very unsubtly steering the conversation towards. “Is there something going on between you two?”

“No,” Cheryl replies curtly, deciding that a flat, no-nonsense denial will sound less suspicious than a lengthy denial.

It’s apparently the wrong direction to take, because Josie lights up like a Christmas tree.

“But you want there to be something, don't you?” Josie asks with a grin, not even phrasing it like a question. Goddamn Josie McCoy, being able to read Cheryl like a book.

“Just like you and Archie then, hm?” Cheryl fires back immediately, deflecting and smiling sweetly when it has the desired effect on Josie.

Josie groans and flops back onto Cheryl’s bed dramatically. “Is it that obvious?”

“Only to yours truly,” Cheryl says, fluffing her hair a few times and, finally satisfied with how it’s sitting, turns around to regard Josie, still sprawled on the bed with her arms hiding her face. “If you look very carefully, you can see little cartoon hearts appear above your head whenever you talk about him.”

Cheryl checks the time on her phone, and decides that, if they’re discussing Josie’s potential love life and not her own, she can be on time to class rather than early.

“You, Josephine McCoy,” Cheryl announces, rising from her chair to join Josie on the bed. “Have left a trail of broken hearts across the city in the two years I have known you, but my best friend intuition is telling me that you do not want to include Archie Andrews on your long list of ex-lovers.”

Josie lifts her arms to uncover her face long enough to shoot Cheryl an unimpressed look. “Thank you for the psychoanalysis, Taylor Swift.”

“So, why are you holding back?” Cheryl asks, tugging at Josie’s arms until her face is no longer hidden. Josie glares up at her and Cheryl raises her eyebrows in question. “Every time he looks at you, he looks like he can hear the angels singing, and you are not much better.”

Josie sighs dramatically, and if Josie is about to pour her heart out to Cheryl then her art history lecture can wait. “I always had it drilled into my head by my mom that studies and music had to come first, that boys and relationships could wait until I was Broadway’s newest darling.” The words sound like they’ve been rehearsed hundreds of times, and Cheryl gets the feeling Josie is quoting her mother here. “I’ve only had one actual boyfriend, and that was Finn Thompson when I was fifteen. I mean, that was  _high school_ , that wasn’t even a real relationship.”

“What’s your point? That you’re worried Archie will be put off by your lack of experience?”

Josie chuckles. “I think we both know I have no lack of experience.”

“Don’t be so crude,” Cheryl grimaces as she swats Josie on the arm. “You know I’m not talking about physical experience.”

“I guess I’m just...scared. Of putting myself out there. Of putting my heart out there, and losing myself in the process over some boy that might not even be worth it.” Josie sighs. “Music first, love second. That was always the plan, and I’ve never minded that being the plan.”

Cheryl hazards a guess. “Until now?”

“Until now,” Josie agrees. “I never expected Archie to come along and put a dent in that plan.”

“Well, as far as I can tell, you came out of the womb belting out Streisand, so as wonderfully distracting as I’m sure Archie is, I highly doubt his abs are impressive enough to completely derail your fully annotated step-by-step plan for stardom that you’ve had your entire life.”

"It's colour-coded too."

“You deserve a chance at happiness, JoJo. And for what it’s worth, Archie seems like one of the good ones,” Cheryl says, before shrugging and continuing in an offhand tone. “Besides, if he ever dares to break your heart, he’ll have a Blossom and a Lodge to answer to, and once we are done maiming him and have left him horribly and permanently disfigured, you can use all the money you’ll make from the Grammy award winning album you’ll write about him to pay our bail.”

Josie laughs, sitting up and pulling Cheryl into a hug. “My life would be so dull without you, Cheryl.”

Cheryl returns the hug, pleased with herself that she appears to have deterred Josie’s inquisition for the time being. Abruptly, Josie pulls back and fixes Cheryl with a smug look, which leaves Cheryl momentarily bewildered at the change of pace.

“See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Josie says cheerfully. “I spilled my guts, now let’s see yours.”

It dawns on her immediately what Josie has done. “First of all, ew. Secondly, did you just admit you liked Archie to try and manipulate me into admitting I like Toni?”

Cheryl is almost impressed.

“When your best friend’s a Blossom, you pick up some things along the way,” Josie grins. “Did my evil tactic work? Is there anything you feel like you should share with your bestest friend in the whole world who loves you very much and fully supports your choice in potential girlfriends?”

“I have nothing to say to you,” Cheryl huffs, ignoring Josie’s snickering and getting up from the bed to stomp petulantly out of the room.

“Mm, wrong answer, “ Josie says as she follows Cheryl into the living room. “Quit playing dumb, Miss 4.0 GPA. You’re forgetting that I was there for the whole Heather saga. I know what  _Cheryl-with-a-crush_  looks like, and this is a textbook example.”

“I believe I've missed the part where this is any of your business,” Cheryl mutters as she retrieves her jacket from the eyesore of a coatstand Veronica bought — also because  _it’s vintage, Cheryl! —_ but when she tries to escape out of the door, Josie stands in front of her and blocks her path.

“You’re currently in the denial phase of your crush,” Josie continues, refusing to budge at Cheryl’s glare. “Next up is anger, where you will probably just get incredibly jealous over anyone who even so much as says hello to Toni, hopefully you’ll just skip bargaining and depression because that’s just a mood killer, and then you’ll accept that you’re head over heels for your little ragamuffin and become the university’s next power couple.”

Cheryl rolls her eyes. “First of all, you sound like Veronica, and one of her is more than enough. Second of all, those are the stages of  _grief_ , and I do not have a fatal and incurable disease, I have merely had a momentary lapse in control over my limbic system.”

“I sucked at biology but even I know that’s the part of the brain that deals with feelings.“ Josie’s grin turns impossibly wider. “Is this you admitting it’s a crush?”

“Dear God,” Cheryl huffs once it becomes apparent that Josie isn’t going to let her leave the apartment without a confession. “Fine. There is a… Moderate to high chance that I have feelings for Toni that are beyond strictly platonic.” Cheryl quickly keeps talking when it looks like Josie’s about to explode. “But that’s all it is. A fleeting, whimsical thing that will pass with time and fade into the ether, along with all my other bad decisions. Such as this conversation.”

“Password accepted,” Josie says, moving out of Cheryl’s way and bowing to her as she storms past. Josie just laughs in response to Cheryl’s parting comment of  _goodbye, I hope you are aware that I hate you._

Cheryl groans once the door has shut behind her and she knows Josie can no longer hear her.

It’s not that she doesn’t  _want_ to gossip about her crush with her best friend the way she never really got to do — at least, not in the real way — when she was a teenager. It’s just that the more people know about her little infatuation, the more real and tangible it becomes, and the harder it becomes to ignore.

/

Saturday night, the auditorium on the east campus has been transformed into the event space for the charity showcase. The bar extends across one side of the hall, tuxedoed bartenders behind it while waistcoat-clad waiters wander around armed with trays of champagne flutes. The stage takes up the other side of the hall, currently empty apart from a set of drums, three microphone stands, and a lone sound technician tinkering with a guitar in preparation for the evening’s entertainment.

Cheryl is standing near the bar with Kevin, exchanging a silent  _are you seeing this_ look while they watch Josie fussing with Archie’s squint bowtie, when she catches sight of Fangs hovering by the entrance to the hall. Toni appears beside him a second later, and Cheryl almost drops her champagne flute.

Dear God, how on  _earth_ is she supposed to make it through tonight without losing her damn mind when Toni looks like  _that_? Cheryl groans internally at her momentary loss in composure, before she steels herself. She fake-smiled her way through countless Blossom family parties and Lodge family galas and Cooper family fundraisers in high school, so university events and charity dinners where she no longer has to put on a facade and doesn’t have Penelope and Clifford breathing down her neck are second nature to her.

A fancy party with complimentary champagne, a strict dress code, and a plethora of cute bartenders to flirt with? This is Cheryl’s domain. This is where she excels. She can get through this without throwing herself at Toni.

Hopefully.

Once she’s managed to school the stunned expression on her face back into casual indifference, she nudges Kevin and points towards where Fangs and Toni are still lurking, looking slightly lost. “Our respective dates have arrived,” she tells him, before draining half of her champagne in one gulp to combat how dry her throat suddenly feels.

“Thank God,” Kevin mutters, shooting one last incredulous look at Archie and Josie before linking arms with Cheryl and leading her through the crowd. “A brief reprieve from that heterosexual nonsense.”

Fangs spots them first as they make their way over, and his face lighting up at the sight of Kevin makes Toni turn to look.

For a brief moment, Toni’s perpetual cool and disaffected demeanour drops. Her lips part and her eyes widen in shock as she takes in the sight of Cheryl walking towards her. Her throat bobs visibly when her gaze drops to sweep over the rest of Cheryl’s body, and Cheryl feels a flush creeping down her spine at the look on Toni’s face.

Cheryl can’t help but preen inwardly at the small victory.  _That’s right Topaz, you were not the only one puberty was kind to_. Cheryl knows how hot she is, especially in the floor length dress in her signature colour, but it’s always nice to have that confirmed in the reactions she receives.

“Wow,” Fangs speaks first, wolf-whistling at Cheryl. “Talk about a devil in a red dress.”

“Your boyfriend is standing right here,” Kevin points out dryly, the mock outrage on his face disappearing when Fangs turns to him with a beaming smile and leans in to kiss him hello.

“Devil in a tuxedo with a sparkly bowtie doesn’t have the same ring to it, sorry babe.”

Kevin rolls his eyes affectionately, slipping his arm around his boyfriend’s waist and turning to Toni. “You look a knockout as always, Toni. I am obsessed with everything that is happening with this dress.”

 _Knockout_ is an understatement, in Cheryl’s completely unbiased opinion. Toni’s wearing a deep purple dress with a plunging neckline that’s just toeing the line of  _too scandalous_ ; there’s a  _lot_ of skin on show, and Cheryl has to make a conscious effort to keep her jaw attached to the rest of her skull. Her hair is pinned up in a fancy updo that looks like it took at least an hour of preparation and half a bottle of hairspray, and there isn’t a stitch of leather in sight, nothing to suggest her Serpent affiliations other than the green crystal snake charm hanging around her neck.

“So, what’s your verdict, Northside Princess?” Toni says, gesturing down at herself. “Do you think anyone’s going to ask me to take their coat, or would I fit right in on the Real Housewives of Riverdale?”

Cheryl takes the opportunity to drag her gaze over every inch of Toni’s body under the guise of inspecting her outfit choice — she only has so much self-control, and Toni’s given her an open invitation — and prays her voice doesn’t waver when she speaks. “You clean up alright, I suppose.”

“I could say the same for you.” Toni gives her a once-over in return, and Cheryl can feel her traitorous body heat up under Toni’s gaze. “Bombshell has never been a more apt nickname.”

Fangs is smirking like he knows something Cheryl doesn’t, and Kevin is looking between the two of them with increasingly raising eyebrows, so Cheryl clears her throat and suggests they continue to take advantage of the complimentary champagne and then find a spot with a good view of the stage.

Veronica and Reggie join them eventually, and Reggie and Fangs take turns making trips to the bar to replenish their drink supply while the first acts of the night — including Archie, who receives cheering so loud from Cheryl, Veronica and Kevin that he briefly goes as red as his hair — go through their respective sets.

As the final act of the night, The Pussycats have a slightly longer setlist, and they go through a wide range of songs, some covers and some originals, starting out with a sugar-sweet upbeat version of Candy Girl, slowing things down midway with an eerie cover of the Dusty Springfield version of Spooky, and ending with a riotous performance of Out Tonight from RENT.

Archie, having joined them after his set was finished, looks enamoured the entire time, and Josie does a terrible job of looking anywhere except at him during their performance of All Through The Night.

Cheryl meanwhile, does an equally terrible job of not glancing sideways at Toni while the Pussycats are playing Unsuspecting Hearts from Carrie: The Musical, a song Cheryl knows for a fact Josie has shoehorned into their setlist at the last minute and she has a sneaking suspicion that Josie is trying to send her some kind of pointed, unsubtle message.

 _Love can find you when you least expect_ , Josie croons onstage, deliberately staring at Cheryl,  _funny how two lives connect._

Cheryl glances over at Toni, standing on the other side of their little group, and almost as if she felt Cheryl’s eyes on her, Toni meets her gaze. For a second, it feels like they’re the only two people in the room, and the smile Toni shoots her way makes something flutter dangerously in Cheryl’s stomach.

 _Let yourself go, give someone half a chance, maybe she’s waiting just for you_ , Josie continues, looking incredibly pleased with herself at the pronoun change.  _You never know, this could be paradise, maybe your dreams just might come true_.

Cheryl breaks the staring contest, draining the rest of her drink while her heart thunders inside her chest. There’s no way that Toni doesn’t know. Not when Cheryl is so terrible at hiding it, so abysmal at hiding all the emotions that bubble up after two seconds in Toni’s presence.

She wonders how much longer she can keep this up. Keep up this facade of only viewing Toni as a friend, pretending like she doesn’t want Toni more than she’s ever wanted anything in her life, like Toni doesn’t disarm her so utterly and completely.

Cheryl turns away from Toni to locate Reggie. She needs another drink.

/

By the time Cheryl arrives at the Whyte Wyrm the following Saturday, with Josie, Archie, Veronica and Reggie in tow, the night is already in full swing. Sweet Pea is outside having a cigarette and talking to Daffodil — much to Cheryl’s amusement and Josie’s horror — and he waves hello to them, letting them know which table Toni has commandeered for them all inside.

The first indication that Toni is already a little tipsy is the way she insists on giving everybody — including Archie, who she has met for about the grand total of five minutes at Josie’s charity showcase the previous weekend — a welcome hug.

The second indication is the heated look on her face when she sees what Cheryl is wearing. Toni is still sober enough to hide it as quickly as it appeared, but not sober enough to stop it in the first place. Score one for Cheryl.

 _As much as I like your crimson-couture aesthetic, you might need to augment it_ , Toni had said smugly, almost as if she didn’t believe Cheryl would do it.

Well, Cheryl Blossom does  _not_ back down from a challenge, and after throwing her entire wardrobe onto her bed earlier and surveying it intently, had picked out the tightest pair of black jeans she owns, a black long-sleeved top that is cut low enough for Veronica to comment on it, calling it  _outrageously booby_ , and topping it off with a blood red leather jacket she had bought a few weeks prior and had been waiting for the perfect time to debut it.

The sky-high heeled boots she has on are Alexander McQueen, but since they look suitably gang-appropriate with scuffs and buckles all over them, she thinks Toni will let the designer label slide.

“Wow,” Toni says, and there’s a few seconds where she seems to struggle to think what else to say. “I asked for wannabe gang member Cheryl Blossom, and you certainly delivered.”

“Careful what you wish for,” Cheryl responds with a smirk, handing over a neatly wrapped gift before a certain annoying McCoy can pick up on the flirtatious tone in both their voices. “Bon anniversaire, ma chérie.”

“I suck at French, but I’m hoping you just called me something nice,” Toni replies, peering inside the bag with interest.

Cheryl has managed to track down a maple syrup infused bottle of Bourbon from a slightly shady sounding store in Greendale, along with a limited edition vinyl record copy of Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, both neatly wrapped up in pink tissue paper and tucked inside a gift bag with a large cartoon owl on it.

Toni doesn’t open the present yet, instead handing it to the woman behind the bar —  _Byrdie_ , as she is introduced to Cheryl — for safekeeping.

“Whatever it is, I’m sure you went way over the price limit I set for you,” Toni laughs when Cheryl tries to object. “And I don’t want it getting broken.”

Toni stays attached to Cheryl’s side for a while, leading her through the bar and introducing her to some Serpents of varying levels of sobriety with varying levels of stupid nicknames, before Veronica and Reggie steal her away with the promise of buying her a birthday drink. Cheryl spends some time helping Josie avoid Daffodil, finds a few moments to threaten to disembowel Archie if he even thinks about hurting Josie, and then third wheels-slash-mediates a particularly heated discussion about Camus between Veronica and Jughead, and then lets Fangs talk her into trying something called a King Cobra, which is apparently a  _Toni Topaz original, Whyte Wyrm exclusive_ , according to Byrdie.

With the exception of their second first meeting two months ago, this is the first time Cheryl’s spent an extended amount of time in the Whyte Wyrm and around a multitude of other Serpents. Privately, she had been a little concerned that the Serpents wouldn’t want anything to do with her, considering her thousand dollar leather jacket, her entourage consisting of a Lodge, the mayor’s daughter and two beefed up jocks, and all of her general gang inauthenticity.

Thankfully, that is not the case. Given Toni’s, and by proxy Jughead’s, Fangs’ and Sweet Pea’s acceptance of Cheryl and her friends, the rest of the Serpents are all very welcoming. Veronica has immediately befriended a Serpent that also attends Rockland University and shares a lecture with her; Josie is having a lengthy discussion about jazz music with Byrdie; Archie and Jughead appear to have kindled a bromance on sight; and Reggie has been roped into a game of pool with Toni, Sweet Pea, and Fangs’ sister Francesca.

Cheryl watches Toni flip Francesca off, drain half of her beer in one go, and then starts lining up her shot with the kind of focused intensity that only comes from having to compensate for one too many drinks.

Sweet Pea had invited Cheryl to join in the pool game earlier while he was at the bar getting another drink, but she had declined on the basis that she has no clue how to play.

(“Really? You’ve been hogging all my Toni time recently and she hasn’t taught you how to play?” He had said with an amused expression. “I’ll be having words with her, don't you worry.”

Cheryl’s not exactly sure how she would respond to Toni offering to teach her how to play. She’s already had two rum and cokes and she’s not entirely sure how her body would react should Toni choose to drape herself over Cheryl to show her how to aim a pool cue like a clichéd scene straight out of a romantic comedy.)

Toni rounds the pool table to take her next shot, and the green Serpent on the back of her jacket stares across the bar at Cheryl, and she’s reminded for the hundredth time how different their respective worlds are. Different galaxies, almost, Cheryl muses to herself as she watches Toni sink the ball into the far corner and then engage in some bizarre handshake with Francesca that is clearly some weird Serpent tradition.

When she’s alone with Toni, it’s sometimes easy to forget that this is her real world. Leather and motorcycles and dark dive bars that serve different beers each week named after different snakes, all with the vague threat of gang violence lurking around every corner. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that she’s no longer the centre of Toni’s universe, hasn’t been for years, and is now merely a satellite orbiting around her, never quite touching the surface.

She wonders if Toni gets the same burst of burning hot jealousy when she sees Cheryl with Josie or Veronica that Cheryl experiences whenever she sees Toni gossiping about Serpent business with Fangs, or playing pool with Sweet Pea, or talking about life on the Riverdale south side with Jughead. That same, bizarre, completely irrational  _I was there first_ possessive jealousy. Which is ridiculous, and borderline childish. Cheryl may have known Toni first, but Jughead and Fangs and Sweet Pea have known her just as long.

Toni looks up from the pool game when Reggie moves away from her side to line up his own shot, and even drunk and unsteady on her feet, even with an entire crowded bar between them, she finds Cheryl instantly, meeting her gaze from across the room.

Toni raises her — now empty, Cheryl notes with amusement and slight concern for Toni's wellbeing tomorrow morning — glass in lieu of a wave, and just like that, the smile on Toni’s face eases the green-tinged ache in her chest.

“I’m torn,” Josie announces, appearing next to Cheryl out of nowhere and snapping her out of her lovestruck gazing. “On the one hand, I’m very proud that you’ve come so far since you first came out to me that you’re now able to stare so openly at another girl like you want to bend her over that pool table, but on the other hand, I think you might actually have some drool on your chin, which is not very becoming of you.”

Sometimes, Cheryl wonders if shedding her ice queen persona long enough to acquire real friends was more hassle than it’s worth.

“Why don’t you just tell her you like her?” Josie continues, before Cheryl can tell her to get lost. “Your crush obviously hasn’t gone away like you hoped it would.”

“Because I possess brain cells and common sense, apparently unlike yourself.” Cheryl grumbles in response, glancing around suspiciously to make sure nobody is eavesdropping. Cheryl can stomach discussing her feelings for Toni in the privacy of her own home, but discussing them in the centre of the snake pit where everybody around her knows who Toni is makes Cheryl wary enough to lower her voice. “Toni has said so herself, she’s not looking for a relationship. I am not going to be  _that person_ who burdens someone with the knowledge that a friend harbours feelings beyond friendship for them.”

“You were childhood friends who drifted apart, and now a serendipitous twist of fate has brought you back together—” 

“Fate?” Cheryl interrupts with a scoff. “My life is not a John Hughes movie, Josie, no matter how easy that would make everything.”

Josie ignores her. “Are you really going to ignore a sign from the universe like that?”

“The universe needs to mind its own damn business. As a matter of fact, so do you.”

“Just saying, I held up my end of the bargain and it turned out fine,” Josie says, pointing to where Archie is drunkenly embracing Jughead like they’ve been friends for years.

“I never agreed to anything, Josie. There was no bargain of any form.”

A blonde girl in a Serpent jacket has appeared at Toni’s side the next time Cheryl throws a surreptitious glance towards the pool table, and while Cheryl can’t hear what she’s saying, she can certainly recognise the signs of flirting. The head tilt while laughing at something Toni says. Reaching out to touch Toni on the arm, or play with her hair, presumably under some dumb guise of asking about hair dye.

A surge of white-hot jealousy rushes through Cheryl when she realises there’s nothing to stop Toni from flirting back. 

Somewhere inside her is still that sixteen year old queen bee who never quite got accustomed to wanting things and then not getting them. Cheryl tells that version of herself to shut up. Toni is allowed to flirt with, sleep with, or date whoever she wants. She’s allowed to like someone and people are allowed to like Toni back. She has no idea how Cheryl feels, and even if she  _did_ know the extent to which Cheryl wants her, that still doesn’t give her any kind of a claim over Toni.

If Toni ends up dating someone, then as her best friend, it’s Cheryl’s duty to be as supportive as possible. Even if it means she’s dying inside.

“Green’s really not your colour, Bombshell,” Josie singsongs.

“Go bother your boyfriend, McCoy,” Cheryl growls, turning her back on both Josie and Toni as she goes to look for Veronica to distract herself with.

Veronica dutifully distracts her for a while, managing to convince her that tequila shots are a brilliant idea despite Cheryl warning her of the Spring Break Incident of Freshman Year, and then Veronica pressures her into a darts competition that, halfway inebriated or not, Cheryl wins by a mile, much to Fangs’ disappointment and Kevin’s amusement.

“Hey Byrdie, could I get a Corona and whatever modern day Robin fuckin’ Hood here wants,” Fangs grumbles to Byrdie when Cheryl drags him up to the bar to buy her the winner’s drink.

Cheryl asks for another King Cobra, and Byrdie chuckles at the dejected look on Fangs’ face as she picks up a bottle of spiced rum. “About time someone knocked Hawkeye off his throne. Well done, Red.”

Someone orders pizza, and Cheryl manages to grab a slice of Hawaiin amidst the mad scramble for the food, which leads her into an argument with Sweet Pea about the validity of pineapple on pizza.

At one point, Cheryl notices the blonde Serpent who had been trying to stake a claim on Toni earlier leaving the bar with a particularly moody look on her face. She tries to conceal the smug glee on her face, but judging from the unimpressed look Josie gives her, she isn't too successful.

An hour or two passes without her really seeing much of Toni, but when Cheryl does talk to her again it becomes very clear very quickly that Toni is  _really_ drunk. At least, that’s the only explanation for why she just will  _not stop touching Cheryl_. She keeps playing with Cheryl’s hair, insists on holding her hand, is constantly leaning her head on her shoulder, and there’s been two cheek-kisses that have almost made Cheryl leap ten feet in the air.

Cheryl’s in one of the booths, chatting with Archie and Jughead, when Toni comes back from the bathroom and plops down right onto Cheryl’s lap like that’s a normal thing they do, with absolutely zero regard for Cheryl’s sanity or personal space.

“You’re staying with me tonight, right Cher-Bear?” Toni slurs, wrapping her arms around Cheryl’s neck and resting her head on Cheryl’s shoulder, and good  _Lord_ , which deity did Cheryl piss off recently to deserve this torture?

“Sure, TT. If that’s what you want,” she replies, too distracted by the smell of Toni’s perfume to really think about how she’s going to have to share a bed with a drunk and cuddly Toni.

Cheryl looks across to the other side of the booth. Archie is completely oblivious, instead focusing very hard on constructing a house out of beer mats, but Jughead is watching them like this is the funniest thing he’s ever seen. Cheryl sends a silent thanks upwards to the heavens that the dim light of the bar is covering the flush she can feel on her face. She does  _not_ need Toni’s best friend getting suspicious and asking Cheryl what her intentions with Toni are.

/

Toni almost falls over three times walking-slash-staggering up the stairs in her building, nearly taking Cheryl with her on two occasions, and Cheryl considers just dropping Toni herself when Toni shoves her face into Cheryl’s neck and starts rambling about how good she smells.

“How do you always smell like cherries?” Toni mumbles, and Cheryl would find it hilarious if she wasn’t on the verge of hyperventilating from feeling Toni’s lips brushing against her skin. “I get it’s like, your  _brand_ , the whole Cherry Bakewell thing—”

“Bombshell.”

“Which totally works for you by the way, but it’s like, constant. You’re like a constant fruit salad.”

Toni then launches into a surprisingly detailed list of her opinions on various fruit — Cheryl has never heard such a scathing opinion on bananas before — while Cheryl manages to unlock Toni’s door and shepherd her inside, having had the foresight to take Toni’s keys off her in the cab rather than have to grope around in her pockets to look for them now.

Once she’s managed to get Toni into her room and deposited her on the bed — Toni still in the middle of a lengthy rant on how pears are an underrated fruit — she leaves Toni to deal with taking her shoes off while she locates the largest glass in the kitchen and fills it with water, in the vain hope that forcing some water down Toni’s throat will postpone some of the whining in the morning when the amount of alcohol she ingested catches up to her.

“Cheryl!” Toni announces, jerking up from where she’d been splayed out across her bed when Cheryl reappears in the room. She looks very focused as she stares at Cheryl, like it’s of the utmost importance Cheryl understands whatever she’s about to say. “You’re my best friend. The bestest.”

“I’m flattered,” Cheryl responds in amusement, handing Toni the water. “Drink.”

Toni obediently chugs half the glass before she continues talking. “You are my favourite person in the whole world," she says, smiling dopily up at Cheryl. "I’m so happy we found each other again.”

(Cheryl’s breath catches in her throat, and God, how can she risk giving this up for the minuscule chance Toni likes her back?)

“Me too, TT,” Cheryl responds, giving her a soft smile and making less effort than usual to hide her distinctly  _un_ friendly affection, since it’s highly unlikely Toni is going to remember any of this in the morning.

“Cheryl. Cherry. Cher-Beeeear,” Toni whines when Cheryl starts back towards the bedroom door. “Come cuddle me.”

Cheryl chuckles. “As cute as your clinginess is, I do not sacrifice my nightly routine for anyone.” The pout on Toni’s face almost makes Cheryl relent.  _Almost_. “I’ll be five minutes.” 

When Cheryl comes back into Toni’s room after brushing her teeth and taking off her makeup, Toni’s already fallen asleep, sprawled out and taking up most of the bed, and for a second Cheryl can’t breathe. She pauses in the doorway, taking in the sight of Toni, pink hair splayed out over her white pillowcase, drooling slightly right onto what Cheryl realises with nostalgic fondness is a slightly battered Hoothoot, and just lets herself feel for a moment; feel how much she wants Toni and wishes so badly that she could climb into the bed with her and snuggle up behind her and then kiss her awake in the morning and have the privilege of calling Toni  _hers_.

Just for a moment though. Toni grumbles something in her sleep and it snaps Cheryl out of her creepy staring, and she forces all her non-platonic feelings down and returns to her normal state of stoic acceptance. In the morning she’ll wake up with Toni wrapped around her, because she’s a sleep cuddler, and then she’ll have to spend the entire morning doting on Toni because she just cannot handle her hangovers, and Cheryl will act like it has absolutely no effect on her. Life will go on. Cheryl will continue to pine despite knowing better, and continue to want Toni so much it hurts, and Toni will continue to have no idea. 

Cheryl tries to fall asleep, except now that she’s acknowledged it, now that she’s had her moment of weakness and let herself  _feel_ and think about how utterly smitten she is, she can’t stop.

Cheryl thinks about Toni’s smile, and the way it makes a thousand butterflies erupt in her stomach whenever it’s directed at her. Thinks about the smell of Toni’s perfume, and the way it makes Cheryl’s heart skip a beat every time Toni hugs her and it’s all she can smell for hours after. Thinks about how seeing Toni flirting with that blonde Serpent earlier in the night made burning hot jealousy twist deep inside her.

Thinks about how she’s comfortable enough with Toni to let her curl up next to her on the sofa, put her cold feet on Cheryl, steal half of the blanket and most of the popcorn and lean her head on Cheryl’s shoulder while they’re watching some old black and white movie from the 20’s — Cheryl’s choice — or some gruesome true crime documentary — Toni’s choice — on Netflix, and how it reminds Cheryl of when they were kids watching Saturday morning cartoons together, and Cheryl wonders if she’s been in love with Toni since she was five and just not realised it until now.


End file.
